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Old 14-07-10, 11:19 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
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Join Date: May 2001
Location: New England
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - July 17th, '10

Since 2002


































"People don’t feel in their hearts that it’s wrong [to copy music]. We’ve lost the battle over hearts and minds for copyright law." – Peter Jenner


"So all in all, for a 3 year period, [the RIAA] spent around $64,000,000 in legal and investigative expenses to recover around $1,361,000 [in settlements]." – Ray Beckerman


"Ambient radio waves can already provide enough energy to substitute for AAA batteries in some calculators, temperature and humidity sensors, and clocks." – Brian Otis


"We want to take a little more time to see what else Apple will come up with." – Paul Reynolds



































July 17th, 2010




Double Whammy: The Music Tax Based on Deep Packet Inspection

A cure that kills the patient?
Andrew Orlowski

"The innocent man must be punished!" - Mark Corrigan

"If you start treating everybody like criminals, then pretty soon everybody starts acting like a criminal," says PRS economist Will Page, referring to the Spanish digital music experience.

Spain is the best warning yet of what happens when you slap a clumsy music tax on people. They don't like it. Music copyright infringement in Spain is now rampant, digital revenues are tiny, and resentment against the music industry runs deep.

Yet today we find the PRS arguing for a music tax, and more ominously, it relies on technology from former spook offshoot Detica, which will opt every broadband subscriber into a Phorm-style Deep Packet Inspection regime. So what gives?

A new paper by Page and David Touve (PDF, 630kb) makes the case for pursuing compensation by licensing, rather than litigation. They want to decriminalise P2P file sharing.

"Legal services like Spotify might stand a greater chance of swimming, as opposed to sinking, if they did not face the challenge of competing with illegal, free services," they note. At the same time, the music and movies flowing across the networks "provide value for those who transmit these works to the public".

The problem is that the creators and their investors don't get paid. So far, so good.

The solution is trickier, however. There are several approaches to decriminalising file sharing, and Page and Touve make the case for one in particular, what they call "nudging" the market by imposing levies on ISPs.

"At some date a price would be placed on the indexed measure of unlicensed media on ISP networks," they argue. This would lift the threat of prosecution from ISPs and end-users alike. In short, "the effect of a levy is to license the rights in works and therefore legalise the otherwise illegal activity".

The justification is an application of Coase's idea of market externalities. The classic negative externality is pollution. Tolerating the unlicensed file sharing, argue Page and Touve, gives us a spillover that ultimately harms the ISP.

Oddly, the paper dismisses one of the best ideas it raises - the idea that ISPs should be licensed for file sharing, just as pirate radio stations such as Xfm were brought in from the cold - given spectrum and broadcasting rights in exchange for cash. This is given the bum's rush.

"Could rightsholder [sic] license the ISP for file sharing? Not without revisiting the safe harbours" - is how the paper dismisses the idea. This is odd for a few reasons. Firstly 'safe harbor' from copyright infringement is a US legal precept that is not directly transferrable outside the USA - so it's strange to hear it from a UK performing rights society. Secondly, experts dispute that this is the case.

"You don't need to look at safe harbours, or anywhere else for that matter," Paul Sanders of Playlouder MSP told us. "Everything to do with where the ISP is involved is perfectly capable of being covered under a contract.

"ISPs aren't liable for things they don't know about. You need to make sure your systems only touch what you know about. There are ways to license file-sharing on networks in a fair and open manner."

Secondly, ISPs have already been licensed for file sharing (eg, Soribada in Korea), and many more will be in the future as experiments take place.

Thirdly, the justification for not exploring the idea is that significant legal changes will be required. Yet elsewhere the authors propose alternatives that um… require significant legal changes. The prospect of these, by the way, was dismissed by the Government.

“I understand this would require fresh legislation, which we don’t have any plans for at this time," a BIS spokesperson told the FT.

But the biggest argument against a music tax on ISPs is one of incentives, and here Spain provides a great example of consumer behaviour.

The innocent man must be punished levied

"Were ISPs required to pay a price for the value of copyrighted media on networks," Page and Touve argue, "the mechanism would be in place to encourage a balance between these costs and benefits. This balancing act might occur through the incentive to either (a) 'wise up' the dumb pipes by cleaning out the unlicensed media files in an effort to avoid paying the real costs of these files, or (b) accepting this payment for media as the cost of doing business while finding new ways to source the value of these creative works."

Despite what TalkTalk's Andrew Heaney says, ISPs really, really hate freetards - they run up most of the transit costs, but despite their evident appetite for media consumption, these subscribers bring home no more revenue than a granny who only uses her connection for Hotmail. But realising the value of that is traffic can be done in a number of ways.

You can be sure that Heaney would pass such a tax onto all his subscribers - and let everyone know where to point the finger. The levy punishes all subscribers, yet only one third of broadband subscribers ever engage in P2P copyright infringement - and the hardcore who do it most is much smaller. A levy also gives everyone the chance to act the "victim", and freetards feed off the feeling of victimized by the music business. (See Kick Me Again, RIAA - Please!).

And would an ISP, with the threat of prosecution lifted, really "find new ways to source the value of these creative works"? There's no reason they should, and nothing in the paper suggests they would. They're much more likely to view it as a "problem solved" - the BPI doesn't keep calling any more. Sorted!

One great advantage of voluntary paid-for P2P is that once you put us in the position of being consumers, we start getting stroppy and demanding a better service... unlike with a levy.

Another great advantage is voluntary P2P doesn't require intrusive monitoring for all subscribers, whether they want it or not. As Sanders puts it:

"Things that look benign - like bunging a bit of money to the songwriters - seem to involve handing control of who gets what to the black box division* of BAe Systems."

Bootnote

'Black box' is the name for the pot of royalties collected by performing rights societies, but declared 'unattributable' and never paid out.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/07...usic_levy_dpi/





Double Standard: Unlicensed Bar Music vs. P2P Users
Nate Anderson

Massachusetts federal judge Nancy Gertner just slashed the damage award against admitted P2P user Joel Tenenbaum from $675,000 to $67,500. In her opinion, she drew a fascinating parallel between Tenenbaum's conduct and that of bars and restaurants who don't pay up for a license to play music in public. Why aren't they hit with tremendous six-figure fines?

"The jury's award in this case also appears egregious in light of the damages typically imposed on restaurants, bars, and other businesses that play copyrighted songs in their establishments without first acquiring the appropriate licenses," Gertner wrote.

"These defendants are arguably more culpable than Tenenbaum. Unlike Tenenbaum, who did not receive any direct pecuniary gain from his file-sharing, defendants in these cases play copyrighted music to create a more pleasurable atmosphere for their customers, thus generating more business and, consequently, more revenue."

Yet, in such cases, damage awards are only 2-6x the cost of a public performance license, "a ratio of statutory to actual damages far lower than the ratio present in this case."

Gertner cites numerous cases where restaurants failed to pay up, used the music for commercial gain, and were then hauled to court. The Spring Mount Area Bavarian Resort in Pennsylvania, for instance, was sued over its lack of a performance license back in 2008. The cost of license would have been $3,725; when the resort was found liable, it had to pay damages of $6,750. Other awards in similar cases include $30,000, $34,500, and $16,000 judgments.

By contrast, juries decided that sharing 30 songs on the 'Net (with no pecuniary motivation) was worth $675,000 and that sharing 24 songs might be worth anywhere from $220,000 to $1.9 million (the two Jammie Thomas-Rasset trials in Minnesota).

It didn't help that both defendants lied (and both judges called them out for it in post-trial rulings), but still—the sheer variability of these verdicts for basically similar cases show that juries are plucking numbers from a hat here. When real businesses commit similar offenses, lawyers don't show up to court and utter apocalyptic rhetoric about how unlicensed bar tunes are "killing the music business." And the results aren't designed to bankrupt the establishment in question.

Gertner can't understand the shocking difference in outcomes.

"I cannot conceive of any plausible rationale for the discrepancy between the level of damages imposed in public-performance cases and the damages awarded in this case," she wrote. "The disparity strongly suggests that the jury’s $675,000 award is arbitrary and grossly excessive."
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...-p2p-users.ars





U.S. Authorities Shut Down WordPress Host With 73,000 Blogs
enigmax

After the U.S. Government took action against several sites connected to movie streaming recently, nerves are jangling over the possibility that this is just the beginning of a wider crackdown. Now it appears that a free blogging platform has been taken down by its hosting provider on orders from the U.S. authorities on grounds of “a history of abuse”. More than 73,000 blogs are out of action as a result.

Hot on the heels of recent threats from Vice President Joe Biden and Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator Victoria Espinel directed at sites offering unauthorized movies and music, last month U.S. authorities targeted several sites they claimed were connected to the streaming of infringing video material.

‘Operation In Our Sites‘ targeted several sites including TVShack.net, Movies-Links.TV, FilesPump.com, Now-Movies.com, PlanetMoviez.com, ThePirateCity.org, ZML.com, NinjaVideo.net and NinjaThis.net. In almost unprecedented action, the domain names of 7 sites were seized and indications are that others – The Pirate Bay and MegaUpload – narrowly avoided the same fate.

Fears remain, however, that this action is only the beginning, and that more sites will be targeted as the months roll on. Indeed, TorrentFreak has already received information that other sites, so far unnamed in the media, are being monitored by the authorities on copyright grounds.

Now, according to the owner of a free WordPress platform which hosts more than 73,000 blogs, his network of sites has been completely shut down on the orders of the authorities.

Blogetery.com has been with host BurstNet for 7 months but on Friday July 9th the site disappeared. The following Monday the owner received an email from BurstNet:

Quote:
Due to the history of abuse and on going abuse on this ‘bn.***********’ server.

We have opted to terminate this server, effective immediately. This termination applies to: bn.affiliateplex.com

Abuse Department
BurstNET Technologies, Inc
Further correspondence received the following response:

Quote:
Bn.xx*********** was terminated by request of law enforcement officials, due to material hosted on the server.

We are limited as to the details we can provide to you, but note that this was a critical matter and the only available option to us was to immediately deactivate the server.
…and a later clarification:

Quote:
Please note that this was not a typical case, in which suspension and notification would be the norm. This was a critical matter brought to our attention by law enforcement officials. We had to immediately remove the server.

“We notified him [the Blogetery owner] when we terminated it [the server], and we refunded him his money to his account, because he has other servers with us If he wants the refund to his card, we can easily do that. However, it should be the least of his concerns,” A BurstNet representative later confirmed.

“Simply put: We cannot give him his data nor can we provide any other details. By stating this, most would recognize that something serious is afoot.”
Due to the fact that the authorities aren’t sharing information and BurstNet are sworn to secrecy, it is proving almost impossible to confirm the exact reason why Blogetery has been completely taken down. The owner does, however, admit to handling many copyright-related cease and desists in the past, albeit in a timely manner as the DMCA requires.

Nevertheless, a couple of quick Google searches which are likely to turn up blogs which link to copyright material appear to do just that – here, here and here. That said, on any network this large this type of activity is bound to happen. Many thousands of blogs on the same platform would have been perfectly legal.

“All of the users are without service just like when the Pirate Bay raids happened and all the people who were on the host sites were also taken down,” pointed out an annoyed Blogetery user who contacted TorrentFreak. “I have lost my personal site also and I don’t have any way to contact the owner since his contact info was on the blogetery.com site & that was the only way to contact him.”

Indeed, 73,000 blogs is a significant number to take down in one swoop, regardless of what some users of the site may or may not have been doing. Time will tell if it was indeed a copyright complaint that took down the service but the signs are certainly there. Not so long ago the conclusion that this type of action could be taken on copyright grounds would have been dismissed out of hand, but the current atmosphere seems to be changing.
http://torrentfreak.com/u-s-authorit...-blogs-100716/





Brazil's Copyright Law Forbids Using DRM to Block Fair Use
Cory Doctorow

A UN treaty called the WIPO Copyright Treaty requires countries to pass laws protecting "software locks" (also called DRM or TPM). Countries around the world have adopted the treaty in different ways: in the US, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act prohibits all circumvention of software locks, even when they don't protect copyright (for example, it would be illegal to for me to break the DRM on a Kindle to access my own novels, were they sold with Kindle DRM).

Brazil has just created the best-ever implementation of WCT. In Brazil's version of the law, you can break DRM without breaking the law, provided you're not also committing a copyright violation. And what's more, any rightsholder who adds a DRM that restricts things that are allowed by Brazilian copyright laws ("fair dealing" or "fair use") faces a fine.

It's a fine and balanced approach to copyright law: your software locks have the power of law where they act to uphold the law. When they take away rights the law gives, they are themselves illegal.

§1º. The same sanction applies, without prejudice to other sanctions set forth by law, to whom, through whatever means:

a) hinders or prevents the uses allowed by arts. 46, 47 and 48 of this Act [which addresses limitations to copyright including fair dealing]; or

b) hinders or prevents the free use of works, broadcast transmissions and phonograms which have fallen into the public domain.

http://www.boingboing.net/2010/07/10...yright-la.html





UK Opposes Sanctions for Illegal File-Sharing, Copyrights
Bill Lindner

A recently leaked document by La Quadrature du Net reveals that European Union (EU) negotiators want criminal sanctions introduced into the international Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). Chapter 2 of the proposed ACTA treaty states that "each party shall provide for effective proportionate and dissuasive penalties" which would include "imprisonment and monetary fines" for those caught in illicit activities such as music file-sharing. (Source: laquadrature.net) ACTA Treaty: Can Seize, Destroy Your PC, Electronics

According to the document, anyone believed to have "incited, aided and abetted" copyright infringement could be held liable.

Seizure of "any related materials and implements used in the commission of the alleged offence" -- which could lead to people having their PCs seized -- is also proposed by the European Union. The UK Government, however, will oppose the attempt to criminalize illegal file sharing, citing that the penalties are not appropriate. (Source: computeractive.co.uk)

UK Wants Better Enforcement of Existing Laws

A representative of the UK's Intellectual Property Office (IPO) told Computeractive that the UK is opposed to the creation of new criminal offenses, and suggests the treaty should provide a framework for better enforcement of existing laws. (Source: computeractive.co.uk)

The EU and U.S. governments have pushed for the ACTA, which has been surrounded by controversy because little of its provisions are known by the public since talks have been held in secret.

As noted by Daily Tech, the UK's decision not to support the most extreme U.S. and EU proposed copyright enforcement measures is a troublesome to the governments and corporate lobbyists that support this proposed legislation. (Source: dailytech.com)
More Negotiations Expected in Six Months

ACTA negotiations, which began in October 2006, have been taking place regularly between the EU, U.S., Japan, Switzerland, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, Canada and Mexico, allegedly to address copyright, counterfeiting, and other intellectual property issues.

According to Computeractive, more than 80 non-governmental organizations from all over the world have condemned the talks' secrecy and strongly oppose ACTA. (Source: computeractive.co.uk)

Lucerne, Switzerland was the site of the ninth round of negotiations. More negotiations are expected to be held in about six months.
http://www.infopackets.com/news/gove...pyr ights.htm





BT Confident Digital Economy Act Will be Thrown Out
Barry Collins

BT says it's confident that a court will overturn the Digital Economy Act because it infringes European law.

BT and fellow ISP TalkTalk last week asked the High Court to review the Digital Economy Act, which was rushed through at the end of the last Parliament.

The ISPs claim the legislation wasn't given due scrutiny in the House of Commons - which debated the bill for only two days - and questioned whether it was compatible with EU law.

"It cannot be held that the Digital Economy Act got a fair ride in Parliament," said BT's director of group industry policy, Simon Milner, at a Westminster e-Forum on file-sharing.

"The House of Commons barely got a look at this. Both houses should have a proper look at something, especially if it's controversial."

Milner claimed a clause added at the last minute, which places an onus on ISPs to block sites accused of hosting copyrighted material, was "included without any kind of impact assessment".

BT also claims that the law may infringe a European privacy directive, because the ISP is being asked to retain and manipulate data on its subscribers' internet activity.

"We don’t think the Government followed due process in terms of EU law – it simply did not have the time, because it tried to rush it through," Miler claimed. "In our view, the court will decide that it’s not fine."

Time to move on

Representatives of the content industry took a very different view, arguing that it was time to put the controversy of the Digital Economy Act behind us.

"This sniping at the Digital Economy Act undermines the law," argued Thomas Dillon, a former general counsel for the Motion Picture Association and a member of BAFTA. "It's a done deal. It's too late for that."

Dillon, who said he broadly supported the Digital Economy Act, also called for ISPs to take harsh action against convicted illegal file-sharers. "It would be better for the ISPs to exercise their contractual right to cut off or suspend someone who's a convicted file-sharer," he stated.
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/broadban...-be-thrown-out





Beijing Cracks Down On Piracy

More than a third of the city's 1500 registered Internet cafes will be indicted on suspicion of copyright infringement.
Mike Clendenin

More than a third of the 1500 registered Internet cafes in Beijing have been or will soon be indicted on suspicion of piracy, according to local media reports. The move, initiated by the government, could lead to fines as high as $3 million.

Copyright infringement is much more widespread than simply in Internet cafes. Guilty parties include hotels offering video-on-demand, karaoke bars, schools, and libraries. Video content piracy in China reportedly costs as high as $1.4 billion.

The State Copyright Bureau has adopted a zero-tolerance stance on piracy, but it often lacks the resources to punish violators. On top of the 600 Internet cafes being prosecuted in Beijing, there are a further 30,000 suspected businesses nationwide.

The National League of Internet Cafes said copyright infringement offline by Internet cafes is more of an issue than copyright infringement online. Out of more than 130,000 registered cafes in China, roughly 80,000 of them have never bought any video distribution systems, indicating there are varying degrees of infringement.

Statistics show that in about 150,000 Internet cafes across the country, around 30% of customers watch movies. Recently, the controversial Chinese Movie Copyright Association announced plans to begin formally charging Internet cafes for customers viewing movies. It plans to charge a cafe with 200 machines up to $1,622 a year -- a relatively high sum for low-margin cafes.

These latest measures come shortly after Microsoft began proceedings against an Internet cafe in Dongguan, in China's southeastern Guangdong Province, for using pirated copies of Windows on more than 5,000 computers.

In an attempt to settle out of court, Microsoft asked the Dongguan Internet Service Association to convince Internet cafes to sign up for standard purchase terms on Microsoft products. However, the cafe owners are resisting, saying the royalty payments would put about a quarter of them out of business.
http://www.informationweek.com/story...leID=225800142





File Sharers Targeted with Legal Action Over Music Downloads

Lawyers for Ministry of Sound and other music labels are seeking compensation, threatening court action unless file sharers pay
Miles Brignall

Solicitors for dance music label Ministry of Sound have sent letters to thousands of internet users it believes have illegally downloaded music and says it is determined to take them to court – and extract substantial damages – unless they immediately pay compensation, typically around £350.

Ministry of Sound's move marks an intensification of the legal battle against file sharers, which is seeing more and more lawyers send out what critics call speculative invoicing of downloaders suspected of pirating anything from music tracks to films and games.

Soho firm Gallant Macmillan last week completed a mailout to 2,000 individuals it claims infringed Ministry of Sound's copyright after downloading and sharing music. It follows in the steps of ACS:Law, which has sent many thousands of letters demanding compensation from alleged file sharers, sometimes billing in excess of £1,000. Luke Bellamy, above, contacted Money this week after receiving a £295 demand from ACS:Law, which alleged he downloaded and shared a track from dance music group Cascada.

Some recipients of the letters, concerned about forking out huge damages, have paid up. Others have been mystified – they claim never to have downloaded the tracks. Meanwhile, some legal specialists say the threats are largely unenforceable. Unless a user confesses to illegally downloading a file, or a court order is obtained to seize a computer and the file is then located on its hard drive, consumer groups say, it's hard to see how such an action will succeed.

Even the body that represents the UK recorded music industry, the BPI, which is keen to stamp out illegal filesharing, says it does not condone the mass-mailing of alleged internet pirates. "Our view is that legal action is best reserved for the most persistent or serious offenders, rather than widely used as a first response," it says.

Most recipients of the letters have binned them and, to date, avoided any further action. But Gallant Macmillan says it is taking a different approach to the other legal firms that pioneered this business, and that its sole client, Ministry of Sound, is serious when it threatens legal action. Until now, none of these cases have ended up in UK courts. A Ministry of Sound spokesman says that actions have been won in German courts, and it is confident that it can do the same in the UK.

Bellamy, 23, a lifeguard from Dudley, West Midlands, lives with his parents, but pays for the O2 broadband connection into the family home. The letter sent to him by ACS:Law claims his internet account was used to download Evacuate the Dancefloor by Cascada, from the filesharing website uTorrent.

The letter, which runs to nine pages, goes on to claim that this was in breach of ACS's clients' copyright, and offers to settle its potential claim if Bellamy pays nearly £300 in compensation.

"Getting a letter like this is extremely worrying. I have never downloaded anything from this website and yet I am being chased for this money. My parents have been worried by this, and frankly I've got better things to do with my time than deal with this."

And he is by no means alone. The internet is awash with similar complaints from anxious web users - many of whom who did download the files where they have been accused of infringing copyright, but also from plenty who insist they didn't. The letters demand anywhere between £300 and £1,200. The law firms sending the letters obtain the names and addresses of the downloaders from internet service providers (ISPs). To get access, they usually seek a high court order, and ISPs have no choice but to hand over the details.

In November 2008, Money first reported that solicitors were sending out threatening letters to net users. We featured a Hertfordshire couple sent a demand to pay £503 for "copyright infringement" or face a high court action. The 20-page "pre-settlement letter" from legal firm Davenport Lyons demanded money on behalf of German pornographers, who claimed the pair had illegally downloaded a porn film. The couple said they had no idea how to even download a film, even if they had the inclination, which they didn't.

Michael Coyle, solicitor advocate and MD of the Southampton-based law firm Lawdit, who has represented hundreds of people who have received these letters, says none of his cases have gone to court.

"A significant number of cases were connected to porn, seeking to embarrass porn users into paying up, and it developed from there. Perhaps as many as 10% of those receiving letters have paid up, but the rest have just disappeared. These firms are trying to argue that just because you pay for the internet connection you are somehow responsible for everything that is downloaded on it – whether you were responsible or not. It just doesn't stand up in law," he says.

"It seems to me that the only way a claim can be upheld is if you admit it or if they inspect your hard drive."

He is so confident that a claim by the likes of ACS:Law would not succeed that he has offered to defend anyone in court for free – providing they didn't download the offending file.

Following a complaint by consumer group Which? (and others) Davenport Lyons, the law firm which pioneered the approach in the UK, is facing a probe by the Solicitors Regulation Authority. Which? says it has had 200 complaints from the public on this issue, and has several pages on his website advising consumers what they should do if they receive such a letter.

"Remember that you have to be actively involved to be guilty of copyright infringement," it says.

"If you're not, explain why and ask for the proof that positively identifies you as the culprit. They may make counterclaims or raise other issues when they reply – but concentrate on making them prove it was you." Which? recently warned those affected not to reply to a request by ACS:Law to fill in a questionnaire the company apparently sends to all those who deny any involvement.

Deborah Prince, head of legal affairs at Which?, says people are under no obligation to fill in these questionnaires. "Which? believes it is outrageous that ACS:Law is asking consumers to provide evidence to support the claims that it is making on their clients' behalf. It should have all the evidence it needs before making these allegations. If it doesn't, then it shouldn't be asking unrepresented consumers to provide that evidence."

Andrew Crossley, head of ACS:Law, says his letters do not accuse the recipients of "downloading".

"We have written to your reader, as with everyone else we have written to, informing them that we have evidence one of our clients' copyrighted works was made available through a filesharing network to others from the internet connection they have.

"In other words, the work was uploaded, not downloaded, and is distributed many times over and given to others who in turn make it available to many others.

"All this is done without reference to the copyright owner, who receives no payment for this often repeated transaction, denying our clients income."

He says the amount demanded in the letters is a fraction of the damages that would be awarded in a successful civil action for copyright infringement, and claims illegal filesharing has been devastating to the creative industries.

He declined to comment on how many cases had gone to court, but said: "I can confirm proceedings have been issued and that more proceedings are to be issued in increasing numbers.

"The amount we request in compromise is a token payment to reflect some small amount of the losses of our clients to illegal filesharing."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2010...usic-downloads





It's Official: Software Will be Unpatentable in NZ
Paul Matthews

Despite what appears to be a big-budget lobbying effort by the pro-patent fraternity, Hon Simon Power announced today that he wouldn't be modifying the proposed Patents Bill hence software will be unpatentable once the Bill passes into law.

This is significant. As we've previously pointed out software patents aren't black and white, and there are certainly pros and cons. However on balance, we believe they represent a far greater risk to smaller NZ-based software providers than opportunity, and there are many cases where they have significantly stifled innovation.

We believe it's near impossible for software to be developed without breaching some of the hundreds of thousands of software patents awarded around the world, hence many software companies in New Zealand, creating outstanding and innovative software, live a constant risk that their entire business will be wound up overnight due to litigious action by a patent holder.

This has led to many a "patent troll" company, primarily in the US. These are non-software companies who exist only to buy up old patents with the sole intention of suing innovative software companies for apparent breach of these patents. The effects of this have been chilling.

Make no mistake, the intellectual property contained in software should be protected. However Copyright provides significant protection, as per other similar activities. The very nature of software should preclude it from patentability in our view.

The case against software patents has been laid out well by companies such as Orion Healthcare and Jade Corporation, probably the two largest software exporters in New Zealand by far.

Orion's Ian McCrae recently stated:

Quote:
Obvious things are getting patented. You might see a logical enhancement to your software, but you can’t do it because someone else has a patent. It gets in the way of innovation.

If an inventor has a really original and outstanding idea, then a patent might be merited. But, in general, software patents are counter-productive and are often used obstructively.

We are a software company. Our best protection is to innovate and innovate fast.
Jade sent me this note in support of NZCS's position on software patents:

Quote:
Jade Software Corporation does not support patents related to software.

Reflecting this position we withdrew from applying for patents a number of years ago.

We believe the patent process is onerous, not suited to the software industry, and challenges our investment in innovation.
As I understand it, Orion and Jade together represent around 50% of New Zealand's software exports, so the fact that they have come out so strongly against is significant.

There's a good reason these companies and most other NZ-based software companies don't support software patents. The risk they pose to genuine, innovative and hard working New Zealand software companies is simply too great.

We believe this is a win for innovative New Zealand software companies who will now have a reduced, albeit still present, risk when creating innovative software.

Interestingly, the Bilski case, a major case looking at patentability of business processes and by extension software patents, was settled in the US in the last week or so as well. At first this seemed to not have dealt with the issue or settled the case of whether business processes or especially software should be patentable in the US, however there are some interesting developments since that may mean this isn't the case after all.

For instance, according to Groklaw, the first of a huge backlog of software patent applications in the US system has been rejected due to Bilski, with the ruling that "The unpatentability of abstract ideas was confirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court in Bilski v. Kappos". On the face of it, this would appear to have the effect of canning pure software patents in the US, which is massively significant.

It will be interesting to see how this one develops.

The matter isn't over yet in New Zealand, of course. The next issue will be in ensuring that the guidelines to be developed protecting embedded systems (ie non-abstract inventions with a software component) are strong enough to remove the possibility of software patents by stealth, and NZCS will maintain a very close watching brief on this.

All in all, however, we believe this is great news for software innovation in New Zealand.
http://www.nzcs.org.nz/news/blog.php?/archives/97-.html





Court: FCC Indecency Policy Is "Unconstitutionally Vague"
FMQB

A U.S. federal court of appeals has struck down the FCC's controversial policy on indecency enforcement. According to multiple reports, the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals has declared that the FCC's ability to punish broadcasters for "fleeting expletives" is "unconstitutionally vague."

A panel of three judges in New York agreed with major broadcasters such as NBC and Fox that the FCC's rulings had been unfair and a First Amendment violation. The judges said the Commission's policy had been "creating a chilling effect that goes far beyond the fleeting expletives at issue here."

In their ruling, the judges granted the networks' petition to "review and vacate the FCC's order and the indecency policy underlying it." The next potential step for the FCC's indecency policy could be a review by the Supreme Court.

Fox has released a statement on the ruling, saying, "We are extremely pleased with the decision handed down today by the second circuit. We have always felt that the government's position on fleeting expletives was unconstitutional. While we will continue to strive to eliminate expletives from live broadcasts, the inherent challenges broadcasters face with live television, coupled with the human element required for monitoring, must allow for the unfortunate isolated instances where inappropriate language slips through."

NAB EVP of Communications Dennis Wharton said in a statement, "NAB supports today’s appellate court decision. As broadcasters, we will continue to offer programming that is reflective of the diverse communities we serve. We believe that responsible decision making by network and local station executives, coupled with program blocking technologies like the V-chip, is far preferable to government regulation of program content."
http://www.fmqb.com/article.asp?id=1874036





WIKILEAKS WEBSITE TO BE ABANDONED

Within the last few hours we have learned that WIKILEAKS (Assange) will commit no more time and effort into restoring our website http://www.wikileaks.org .

The website has been effectively down in terms of document submissions for many weeks, and as we speak there is no way for the general public or potential whistleblowers to upload documents to the site.

We have been told that WIKILEAKS will be launching a completely new site hosted in Iceland. However, Assange would not provide any time lines, or any indication of user options and facilities.

During the exchange, Assange also confirmed that no legal team had been provided to Manning, and no one from WIKILEAKS had met Manning during his detention in Kuwait. This was completely at odds with recent WIKILEAKS emails requesting $50,000 in donor funding for a legal team to fly to Kuwait.

Wikileaks Insider

Authentication Code omitted.
http://cryptome.org/0001/wikileaks-dump.htm





Twitter:

Real change begins Monday in the WashPost. By the years end, a reformation. Lights on. Rats out.

WikiLeaks

http://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/18785390278





Germans Embrace Socializing Online Despite Government Efforts to Protect Them
Kevin J. O'Brien

Chenchao Liu has 446 friends on Facebook, loves his iPhone 3GS and is addicted to Google searches and maps. His Facebook page quotes Frank Zappa: “Information is not knowledge; knowledge is not wisdom; wisdom is not truth; truth is not beauty.”

Healthy skepticism from a 21-year-old college student, but what makes Mr. Liu unusual is that he lives in Germany, in a country whose strict data protection laws have sparked inquiries into the practices of the very companies responsible for those products and services — Facebook, Apple and Google .

Mr. Liu is one of the millions of people in Germany who have helped make those offerings wildly successful in the largest economy in Europe.

“I think many people in Germany, especially those in my age group, do not have as many problems with data protection as the regulators are making out,” said Mr. Liu, a chemistry student at Technical University in Munich. “What it all comes down to is personal responsibility. No one is forcing anyone to use any of these services.”

U.S. technology leaders are under scrutiny in Germany. Google is being investigated by regulators and by the police in Hamburg for having errantly collected personal Internet information like e-mail passwords while doing research for its Street View mapping service.

Facebook is being investigated by a regulator in Hamburg for collecting data on non-Facebook users from the mailing lists of active users. And a German data protection supervisor has asked Apple to explain what kind of information its latest iPhone 4 is storing on users and for how long.

Johannes Caspar, a data protection supervisor in Hamburg who is conducting the investigations into Google and Facebook, said his agency’s job was to protect German consumers from themselves.

“The problem is that many people are unaware what is being done with their data,” Mr. Caspar said. “That is why we are enforcing the laws that we do in Germany.”

Strict privacy laws are a product of the post-World War II reconstruction of Germany, when lawmakers put in place controls over the use of personal information to prevent citizens from being singled out and persecuted by the government.

It is illegal, for example, to publish the image or name of any private person without his permission, including convicted felons, who are usually identified in the media by the initial of their last name only, like Klaus P.

That has not stopped Germans from flocking to a social networking site, or downloading the latest smartphone applications.

Google’s search engine as of May controlled 92 percent of the online search market in Germany, according to ComScore, a research firm based in Reston, Virginia.

That compares with the 65 percent market share Google has in the United States.

Facebook is the No. 2 social networking site in Germany, with about 7.7 million users, according to Inside Network, a research group in Palo Alto, California. All versions of the iPhone, including the iPhone 4, which went on sale in Germany in June, have sold out within days. Apple does not provide specific figures for iPhone sales in Germany.

“What I think we have in Germany is a big disconnect between data privacy laws and consumer sentiment toward privacy,” said Felix Haas, the chief executive and founder of Amiando, a company in Munich that is the largest online event registration platform in Europe.

Amiando is a case in point. Its software is used by the concert promoters of German entertainers like Lena Meyer-Landrut, the winner of the Eurovision song contest this year, and even by the country’s own data protection officials, who registered online to attend their annual convention in the Bavarian town of Würzburg.

The regulators typed their names, addresses and other details into Amiando’s registration form and — if they wanted to receive offers on related events — checked a box authorizing targeted mailings. Amiando, like most German online businesses, does not sell its customer data to third parties, but it makes its list available for targeted mailings.

Third parties never see Amiando’s customer lists, Mr. Haas said. Amiando distributes the mailings itself — but only to users of its software who have asked to receive them.

The U.S. practice of selling customer names and details, Mr. Haas said, is legal but almost never used in Germany because it would destroy a business’s reputation.

“It would erode the trust we have built up,” Mr. Haas said.

Retaining control over his personal data is a top priority for Jan Schwämmlin, a chemistry student at Technical University in Munich who uses Facebook, Google and StudiVZ, the top social networking site in Germany, which is owned by the German publishing group Georg von Holtzbrinck.

“Among my peers, we don’t want to see something like Facebook getting banned,” said Mr. Schwämmlin, who is a classmate of Mr. Liu’s. “These services are practical and allow me to be omnipresent in social life. But I am careful about what information I put out on the Web and don’t want anything coming back to haunt me later in life.”

More and more Germans are disclosing personal details if they can save money doing so. A retail bonus card, called Payback, has 19.4 million subscribers. In exchange for price discounts at major retailers, cardholders give Payback’s operator, Loyalty Partner of Munich, permission to target them with offers.

The company scored a major legal victory in August 2008 when the German Supreme Court, the Bundesgerichtshof, rejected a complaint from national consumer protection officials who had alleged that Payback was not sufficiently informing users about how it used their details in marketing efforts.

“Germans are sensitive and mature concerning privacy issues, but everybody loves ideas like Facebook and Payback,” said Burkhard Grassmann, the Payback chief executive. “People find there are both financial and emotional advantages to using them. So they use them. That’s the reality.”

Dieter Weng, the president of the German Dialogue Marketing Association, a group of 800 businesses that includes the country’s online marketers, said Germany was unlikely to loosen its privacy restrictions.

But the need to encourage the growth of the Internet economy, Mr. Weng said, could help lower barriers for online marketing.

“I think Germans are concerned about personal data being misused by government or law enforcement,” Mr. Weng said. “But for behavioral or attitudinal data about customer preferences, people are more willing to share if they see an advantage in it for them.”

Peter Barron, a Google spokesman in London, said the challenge for regulators was to strike a balance between data protection and nurturing Internet businesses.

“There’s clearly a balance between regulation and innovation,” Mr. Barron said. “If that balance isn’t right, then users and businesses will lose out.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/12/te...isconnect.html





Facebook Unveils Child Safety 'Panic Button'
Daniel Emery

Facebook has announced it will allow a "panic button" application on its social networking site.

The button, aimed at children and teenagers, will report abuse to the UK Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (Ceop) and Facebook.

Once installed, the application appears on their homepage to say that "they are in control online".

The launch follows months of negotiation between Ceop and Facebook, which initially resisted the idea.

Ceop, the government law enforcement agency tasked with tracking down online sex offenders, called for a panic button to be installed on social networking sites last November.

Bebo became the first network to add the button with MySpace following suit, but Facebook resisted the change, saying its own reporting systems were sufficient.

Pressure mounted on Facebook following the rape and murder of 17-year-old Ashleigh Hall by a 33-year-old convicted sex offender, posing as a teenage boy, who she met on Facebook.

Forty-four police chiefs in England, Wales and Scotland, signed a letter backing Ceop's call for a panic button on every Facebook page.
'Reassurance for parents'

The agreement to launch a child safety application is the culmination of months of negotiation between Ceop and Facebook.

Jim Gamble, Ceop's chief executive, said in a statement: "Our dialogue with Facebook about adopting the ClickCeop button is well documented - today however is a good day for child protection.

"By adding this application, Facebook users will have direct access to all the services that sit behind our ClickCeop button which should provide reassurance to every parent with teenagers on the site."

Facebook's head of communications in the UK, Sophy Silver, told BBC News that the new app would integrate reporting into both Facebook and Ceop's systems.

"Both sides are happy as to where we have got," she said.

"We still have the Facebook reporting system and by having a pre-packaged application that users play an active part in, you not only help keep them safe, it makes all of their friends aware too, and acts as a viral awareness campaign.

"Ultimately though, this makes for a safer environment for users and that's the most important part," she added.

In addition to the online reporting application, a new Facebook/Ceop page is being set up, with a range of topics that, it is hoped, will be of interest to teenagers, such as celebrities, music and exams. It will link these subjects to questions about online safety.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/10572375.stm





'Digital Drugs' at Mustang High School have Experts Warning of Slippery Slope

As digital drugs or i-dosing appears in Oklahoma, experts warn that it's not the sounds themselves that should worry parents. The websites where the tones are sold entice young people down a slippery slope, they say.
Sonya Colberg

Schools and drug experts are warning parents to beware of "digital drugs" that Mustang High School students blamed for their apparent intoxication.

Three students were sent to the principal's office when they appeared to be high on drugs or alcohol in March, said Mustang School District Superintendent Bonnie Lightfoot. She said the kids explained that they had tried something called "i-dosers."

Young people plug into i-dosers through putting on headphones and downloading music and tones that create a supposed drug-like euphoria.

The technology is designed to combine a tone in each ear to create a binaural beat designed to alter brainwaves. Whether it was kids faking it, the power of suggestion or a high wasn't clear to administrators who investigated the students' claims. Adding to the mystery was the fact that these kids weren't troublemakers. So the worried Lightfoot sent parents a letter warning them to be aware of this new temptation to kids.

"The parents' reaction was the same as mine. Just shocked," Lightfoot said. "You've got to be kidding."

Now other schools and drug experts are concerned about this trend just hitting Oklahoma.

"I think it's very dangerous," said Karina Forrest-Perkins, chief operating officer of Gateway to Prevention and Recovery in Shawnee. While there are no known neurological effects from digital drugs, they encourage kids to pursue mood altering substances, she said.

Some parents have called the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs Control worried about i-dosing, said OBN spokesman Mark Woodward. He said the i-dosing effect is likely sort of a placebo rather than a valid threat to children's brain waves.

"The bigger concern is if you have a kid wanting to explore this, you probably have a kid that may end up smoking marijuana or looking for bigger things," Woodward said.

The digital drug website features advertisements enticing young people to buy dangerous pills, the hallucinatory herb salvia and synthetic marijuana.

"It's going to lead them to other web sites that will get them in trouble," Woodward said.

When young people go to one website to download digital drugs, they'll find a product line featuring titles such as "alcohol," "opium," "marijuana" and "orgasm." The website shows the digital drugs have been downloaded more than 1 million times.

To sell more, the websites encourage users to write about their experiences on the site. One user said animals popped up and paint seemed to fall from the wall. Another user wrote, "I feel nothing. I'm starting to wonder if this is just a big ploy to get money from gullible customers." Still others said they experienced euphoria or sensations similar to getting high on crack and other drugs.

A site says that the i-doses may not be downloaded by anyone under 18 years of age.

"Come on. You know they are," Forrest-Perkins said. "No one over 18 is trying to get stoned on a song."

Kids disappointed in their digital experience might try huffing paint or another chemical, or smoking marijuana or drinking alcohol, Forrest-Perkins said.

Woodward and Forrest-Perkins pointed out that no studies have concluded that binaural beats actually chemically alter the brain.

A 2005 University of South Florida study looked at whether children and young adults with ADHD could better focus by listening to binaural beats. But the results were inconclusive. The University of Virginia recently received a $357,000 grant to look at pain and anxiety therapies, primarily binaural beat stimulation.

Mental health counselor Jed Shlackman said he has successfully used CDs featuring binaural beats to help treat ADHD patients. He said binaural beats are relatively safe and no more dangerous than activities such as shopping or exercising done in excess by young people.

He said the binaural beats lack the intensity or withdrawal effects of some chemical drugs.

"If a parent notices a child is sitting around all the time with headphones on, they should look into what stresses are happening in the child's life ... and deal with it in a constructive way," Shlackman said.

Lightfoot said like Mustang High School parents, she's shocked over the digital drugs.

"What worries me is the ease in which some people can sell things to kids by saying that it's supposed to be mood altering," she said. "It's a real moneymaker out there."
http://www.newsok.com/digital-drugs-...rticle/3475464





Students, Meet Your New Teacher, Mr. Robot
Benedict Carey and John Markoff

The boy, a dark-haired 6-year-old, is playing with a new companion.

The two hit it off quickly — unusual for the 6-year-old, who has autism — and the boy is imitating his playmate’s every move, now nodding his head, now raising his arms.

“Like Simon Says,” says the autistic boy’s mother, seated next to him on the floor.

Yet soon he begins to withdraw; in a video of the session, he covers his ears and slumps against the wall.

But the companion, a three-foot-tall robot being tested at the University of Southern California, maintains eye contact and performs another move, raising one arm up high.

Up goes the boy’s arm — and now he is smiling at the machine.

In a handful of laboratories around the world, computer scientists are developing robots like this one: highly programmed machines that can engage people and teach them simple skills, including household tasks, vocabulary or, as in the case of the boy, playing, elementary imitation and taking turns.

So far, the teaching has been very basic, delivered mostly in experimental settings, and the robots are still works in progress, a hackers’ gallery of moving parts that, like mechanical savants, each do some things well at the expense of others.

Yet the most advanced models are fully autonomous, guided by artificial intelligence software like motion tracking and speech recognition, which can make them just engaging enough to rival humans at some teaching tasks.

Researchers say the pace of innovation is such that these machines should begin to learn as they teach, becoming the sort of infinitely patient, highly informed instructors that would be effective in subjects like foreign language or in repetitive therapies used to treat developmental problems like autism.

Several countries have been testing teaching machines in classrooms. South Korea, known for its enthusiasm for technology, is “hiring” hundreds of robots as teacher aides and classroom playmates and is experimenting with robots that would teach English.

Already, these advances have stirred dystopian visions, along with the sort of ethical debate usually confined to science fiction. “I worry that if kids grow up being taught by robots and viewing technology as the instructor,” said Mitchel Resnick, head of the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the Media Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, “they will see it as the master.”

Most computer scientists reply that they have neither the intention, nor the ability, to replace human teachers. The great hope for robots, said Patricia Kuhl, co-director of the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences at the University of Washington, “is that with the right kind of technology at a critical period in a child’s development, they could supplement learning in the classroom.”

Lessons From RUBI

“Kenka,” says a childlike voice. “Ken-ka.”

Standing on a polka-dot carpet at a preschool on the campus of the University of California, San Diego, a robot named RUBI is teaching Finnish to a 3-year-old boy.

RUBI looks like a desktop computer come to life: its screen-torso, mounted on a pair of shoes, sprouts mechanical arms and a lunchbox-size head, fitted with video cameras, a microphone and voice capability. RUBI wears a bandanna around its neck and a fixed happy-face smile, below a pair of large, plastic eyes.

It picks up a white sneaker and says kenka, the Finnish word for shoe, before returning it to the floor. “Feel it; I’m a kenka.”

In a video of this exchange, the boy picks up the sneaker, says “kenka, kenka” — and holds up the shoe for the robot to see.

In person they are not remotely humanlike, most of today’s social robots. Some speak well, others not at all. Some move on two legs, others on wheels. Many look like escapees from the Island of Misfit Toys.

They make for very curious company. The University of Southern California robot used with autistic children tracks a person throughout a room, approaching indirectly and pulling up just short of personal space, like a cautious child hoping to join a playground game.

The machine’s only words are exclamations (“Uh huh” for those drawing near; “Awww” for those moving away). Still, it’s hard to shake the sense that some living thing is close by. That sensation, however vague, is enough to facilitate a real exchange of information, researchers say.

In the San Diego classroom where RUBI has taught Finnish, researchers are finding that the robot enables preschool children to score significantly better on tests, compared with less interactive learning, as from tapes.

Preliminary results suggest that these students “do about as well as learning from a human teacher,” said Javier Movellan, director of the Machine Perception Laboratory at the University of California, San Diego. “Social interaction is apparently a very important component of learning at this age.”

Like any new kid in class, RUBI took some time to find a niche. Children swarmed the robot when it first joined the classroom: instant popularity. But by the end of the day, a couple of boys had yanked off its arms.

“The problem with autonomous machines is that people are so unpredictable, especially children,” said Corinna E. Lathan, chief executive of AnthroTronix, a Maryland company that makes a remotely controlled robot, CosmoBot, to assist in therapy with developmentally delayed children. “It’s impossible to anticipate everything that can happen.”

The RUBI team hit upon a solution one part mechanical and two parts psychological. The engineers programmed RUBI to cry when its arms were pulled. Its young playmates quickly backed off at the sound.

If the sobbing continued, the children usually shifted gears and came forward — to deliver a hug.

Re-armed and newly sensitive, RUBI was ready to test as a teacher. In a paper published last year, researchers from the University of California, San Diego, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Joensuu in Finland found that the robot significantly improved the vocabulary of nine toddlers.

After testing the youngsters’ knowledge of 20 words and introducing them to the robot, the researchers left RUBI to operate on its own. The robot showed images on its screen and instructed children to associate them with words.

After 12 weeks, the children’s knowledge of the 10 words taught by RUBI increased significantly, while their knowledge of 10 control words did not. “The effect was relatively large, a reduction in errors of more than 25 percent,” the authors concluded.

Researchers in social robotics — a branch of computer science devoted to enhancing communication between humans and machines — at Honda Labs in Mountain View, Calif., have found a similar result with their robot, a three-foot character called Asimo, which looks like a miniature astronaut. In one 20-minute session the machine taught grade-school students how to set a table — improving their accuracy by about 25 percent, a recent study found.

At the University of Southern California, researchers have had their robot, Bandit, interact with children with autism. In a pilot study, four children with the diagnosis spent about 30 minutes with this robot when it was programmed to be socially engaging and another half-hour when it behaved randomly, more like a toy. The results are still preliminary, said David Feil-Seifer, who ran the study, but suggest that the children spoke more often and spent more time in direct interaction when the robot was responsive, compared with when it acted randomly.

Making the Connection

In a lab at the University of Washington, Morphy, a pint-size robot, catches the eye of an infant girl and turns to look at a toy.

No luck; the girl does not follow its gaze, as she would a human’s.

In a video the researchers made of the experiment, the girl next sees the robot “waving” to an adult. Now she’s interested; the sight of the machine interacting registers it as a social being in the young brain. She begins to track what the robot is looking at, to the right, the left, down. The machine has elicited what scientists call gaze-following, an essential first step of social exchange.

“Before they have language, infants pay attention to what I call informational hotspots,” where their mother or father is looking, said Andrew N. Meltzoff, a psychologist who is co-director of university’s Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences. This, he said, is how learning begins.

This basic finding, to be published later this year, is one of dozens from a field called affective computing that is helping scientists discover exactly which features of a robot make it most convincingly “real” as a social partner, a helper, a teacher.

“It turns out that making a robot more closely resemble a human doesn’t get you better social interactions,” said Terrence J. Sejnowski, a neuroscientist at University of California, San Diego. The more humanlike machines look, the more creepy they can seem.

The machine’s behavior is what matters, Dr. Sejnowski said. And very subtle elements can make a big difference.

The timing of a robot’s responses is one. The San Diego researchers found that if RUBI reacted to a child’s expression or comment too fast, it threw off the interaction; the same happened if the response was too slow. But if the robot reacted within about a second and a half, child and machine were smoothly in sync.

Physical rhythm is crucial. In recent experiments at a day care center in Japan, researchers have shown that having a robot simply bob or shake at the same rhythm a child is rocking or moving can quickly engage even very fearful children with autism.

“The child begins to notice something in that synchronous behavior and open up,” said Marek Michalowski of Carnegie Mellon University, who collaborated on the studies. Once that happens, he said, “you can piggyback social behaviors onto the interaction, like eye contact, joint attention, turn taking, things these kids have trouble with.”

One way to begin this process is to have a child mimic the physical movements of a robot and vice versa. In a continuing study financed by the National Institutes of Health, scientists at the University of Connecticut are conducting therapy sessions for children with autism using a French robot called Nao, a two-foot humanoid that looks like an elegant Transformer toy. The robot, remotely controlled by a therapist, demonstrates martial arts kicks and chops and urges the child to follow suit; then it encourages the child to lead.

“I just love robots, and I know this is therapy, but I don’t know — I think it’s just fun,” said Sam, an 8-year-old from New Haven with Asperger’s syndrome, who recently engaged in the therapy.

This simple mimicry seems to build a kind of trust, and increase sociability, said Anjana Bhat, an assistant professor in the department of education who is directing the experiment. “Social interactions are so dependent on whether someone is in sync with you,” Dr. Bhat said. “You walk fast, they walk fast; you go slowly, they go slowly — and soon you are interacting, and maybe you are learning.”

Personality matters, too, on both sides. In their studies with Asimo, the Honda robot, researchers have found that when the robot teacher is “cooperative” (“I am going to put the water glass here; do you think you can help me by placing the water glass on the same place on your side?”), children 4 to 6 did much better than when Asimo lectured them, or allowed them to direct themselves (“place the cup and saucer anywhere you like”). The teaching approach made less difference with students ages 7 to 10.

“The fact is that children’s reactions to a robot may vary widely, by age and by individual,” said Sandra Okita, a Columbia University researcher and co-author of the study.

If robots are to be truly effective guides, in short, they will have to do what any good teacher does: learn from students when a lesson is taking hold and when it is falling flat.

Learning From Humans

“Do you have any questions, Simon?”

On a recent Monday afternoon, Crystal Chao, a graduate student in robotics at the Georgia Institute of Technology, was teaching a five-foot robot named Simon to put away toys. She had given some instructions — the flower goes in the red bin, the block in the blue bin — and Simon had correctly put away several of these objects. But now the robot was stumped, its doughboy head tipped forward, its fawn eyes blinking at a green toy water sprinkler.

Dr. Chao repeated her query, perhaps the most fundamental in all of education: Do you have any questions?

“Let me see,” said Simon, in a childlike machine voice, reaching to pick up the sprinkler. “Can you tell me where this goes?”

“In the green bin,” came the answer.

Simon nodded, dropping it in that bin.

“Makes sense,” the robot said.

In addition to tracking motion and recognizing language, Simon accumulates knowledge through experience.

Just as humans can learn from machines, machines can learn from humans, said Andrea Thomaz, an assistant professor of interactive computing at Georgia Tech who directs the project. For instance, she said, scientists could equip a machine to understand the nonverbal cues that signal “I’m confused” or “I have a question” — giving it some ability to monitor how its lesson is being received.

To ask, as Dr. Chao did: Do you have any questions?

This ability to monitor and learn from experience is the next great frontier for social robotics — and it probably depends, in large part, on unraveling the secrets of how the human brain accumulates information during infancy.

In San Diego, researchers are trying to develop a human-looking robot with sensors that approximate the complexity of a year-old infant’s abilities to feel, see and hear. Babies learn, seemingly effortlessly, by experimenting, by mimicking, by moving their limbs. Could a machine with sufficient artificial intelligence do the same? And what kind of learning systems would be sufficient?

The research group has bought a $70,000 robot, built by a Japanese company, that is controlled by a pneumatic pressure system that will act as its senses, in effect helping it map out the environment by “feeling” in addition to “seeing” with embedded cameras. And that is the easy part.

The much steeper challenge is to program the machine to explore, as infants do, and build on moment-to-moment experience. Ideally its knowledge will be cumulative, not only recalling the layout of a room or a house, but using that stored knowledge to make educated guesses about a new room.

The researchers are shooting for nothing less than capturing the foundation of human learning — or, at least, its artificial intelligence equivalent. If robots can learn to learn, on their own and without instruction, they can in principle make the kind of teachers that are responsive to the needs of a class, even an individual child.

Parents and educators would certainly have questions about robots’ effectiveness as teachers, as well as ethical concerns about potential harm they might do. But if social robots take off in the way other computing technologies have, parents may have more pointed ones: Does this robot really “get” my child? Is its teaching style right for my son’s needs, my daughter’s talents?

That is, the very questions they would ask about any teacher.

Choe Sang-Hun contributed reporting from Seoul.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/11/sc...robots.html?hp





Reverse Engineer Extracts Skype Crypto Secret Recipe

VoIP service mulls legal action
John Leyden

Cryptoanalysts have published what they claim is the secret recipe behind a Skype encryption algorithm.

A group of code breakers led by Sean O’Neil reckon they have successfully reverse engineered Skype’s implementation of the RC4 cipher, one of several encryption technologies used by the consumer-oriented VoIP service. The proprietary encryption technology is used by the VoIP service to protect communications exchanged between its its clients and severs. It also restricts what clients can access the service, a restriction Skype had plans to ease with the upcoming publication of an API.

Even if independent research proves that the proprietary RC4 algorithm has been exposed it doesn't follow that Skype is open to eavesdroppers, not least because the service uses a variety of encryption techniques.

O’Neil justified the publication of an open source emulation of the algorithm by arguing that Skype's technology is already under exploitation by instant message spammers, so his work only levels the playing field for security researchers. He criticised Skype for practising "security by obscurity" in keeping its algorithm secret for so long. O'Neil reportedly plans to explain his research in greater depth at a presentation before the Chaos Communication Congress (27C3) in Berlin in December.

Skype told [1] Techcrunch that O'Neil's partial leak some months ago was what facilitated spam attacks against users of the VoIP service in the first place.

"We believe that the work being done by Sean O'Neil, who we understand was formerly known as Yaroslav Charnovsky, is directly facilitating spamming attacks against Skype and we are considering our legal remedies," Skype said.

"Whilst we understand the desire for people to reverse engineer our protocols with the intent of improving security, the work done by this individual clearly demonstrates the opposite," it added.

Best practice in cryptography generally assumes that potential adversaries will find access to the algorithm beyond encryption codes, so efforts should be focused on keeping private encryption keys secret. Openly published AES algorithms benefit from the fact that security researchers can independently access the robustness of the encryption schemes and uncover any potential weaknesses.

O'Neil's original blog posting has been pulled but copies can still be found in Google's cache (here [2]). O'Neil has published the obfuscated Skype RC4 key expansion algorithm, only one of a battery of encryption technologies used by Skype. "There are seven types of communication encryption in Skype: its servers use AES-256, the supernodes and clients use three types of RC4 encryption - the old TCP RC4, the old UDP RC4 and the new DH-384 based TCP RC4, while the clients also use AES-256 on top of RC4. It all is quite complicated, but we’ve mastered it all," O'Neil explains.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/07/09/skype_crypto/





"Millions" Of Home Routers Vulnerable To Web Hack
Andy Greenberg

The upcoming Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas offers an annual parade of security researchers revealing new ways to break various elements of the Internet. But few of the talks have titles quite as alarming as one on this year's schedule: "How to Hack Millions of Routers."

Craig Heffner, a researcher with Maryland-based security consultancy Seismic, plans to release a software tool at the conference later this month that he says could be used on about half the existing models of home routers, including most Linksys, Dell, and Verizon Fios or DSL versions. Users who connect to the Internet through those devices and are tricked into visiting a page that an attacker has set up with Heffner's exploit could have their router hijacked and used to steal information or redirect the user's browsing.

Heffner's attack is a variation on a technique known as "DNS rebinding," a trick that's been discussed for close to 15 years. "There have been plenty of patches over the years, but this still hasn't really been fixed," he says.

The hack exploits an element of the Domain Name System, or DNS, the Internet's method of converting Web page names into IP address numbers. (When you visit Google.com, for instance, a domain name server might convert that name into the IP address 72.14.204.147.) Modern browsers have safeguards that prevent sites from accessing any information that's not at their registered IP address.

But a site can have multiple IP addresses, a flexibility in the system designed to let sites balance traffic among multiple servers or provide backup options.

Heffner's trick is to create a site that lists a visitor's own IP address as one of those options. When a visitor comes to his booby-trapped site, a script runs that switches to its alternate IP address--in reality the user's own IP address--and accesses the visitor's home network, potentially hijacking their browser and gaining access to their router settings.

That DNS trick isn't new, and browsers have installed patches for earlier versions of the exploit. But Heffner says he's tweaked it to bypass those safeguards; He won't say exactly how until his Black Hat talk. "The way that [those patches] are circumvented is actually fairly well known," says Heffner. "It just hasn't been put together like this before."

Heffner tested his attack against 30 router models and found that about half were vulnerable. Here's his chart of which are and aren't subject to attack. ("Successful" in the far right column means that the router was successfully hacked.)

Potential fixes implemented in the free DNS replacement OpenDNS and the Firefox NoScript plug-in won't prevent his exploit, Heffner adds.

One comfort for users may be that Heffner's method still requires the attacker to compromise the victim's router after gaining access to his or her network. But that can be accomplished by using a vulnerability in the device's software or by simply trying the default login password. Only a tiny fraction of users actually change their router's login settings, says Heffner. "Routers are usually poorly configured and have vulnerabilities," he says. "So the trick isn't how to exploit the router. It's how to get access to it."

That means concerned users should make sure their router's firmware is updated and patched, and that they're not using default security settings.

Heffner, like most security researchers revealing dangerous bugs, argues that releasing an exploit may be the most effective way to draw attention to severity of the problem and convince both browser and router makers to fix the fundamental vulnerability. "I’m not the first to give a Black Hat talk on DNS rebinding, and I won’t be last," he says. "Everyone has had ample time to fix this."
http://blogs.forbes.com/firewall/201...e-to-web-hack/





Hacker Creates Plugin That Trashes Chrome’s Security
Alex Wilhelm

We hate to scare you on Friday right before a good weekend, but this story is alarming enough that you need to hear about. Before we proceed, know that this exploit is out in the open, be extra careful when you install any Chrome plugin; you may be at risk.

The exploit, developed by programmer Andreas Grech, employs a plugin coded using jQuery to track users’ login information and have it emailed to himself. He claims that he has tested the plugin, and that it has been successful against Twitter, Gmail, and Facebook. In his own words:

Quote:
The Google Chrome browser allows the installation of third-party extensions that are used to extend the browser to add new features. The extensions are written in JavaScript and HTML and allow manipulation of the DOM, amongst other features.

By allowing access to the DOM, an attacker can thus read form fields…including username and password fields. This is what sparked my idea of creating this PoC.

The extension I present here is very simple. Whenever a user submits a form, it tries to capture the username and password fields, sends me an email via an Ajax call to a script with these login details along with the url and then proceeds to submit the form normally as to avoid detection.
If you doubt his statements, he has included the code for the plugin on his website.

In some way, we all owe Mr. Grech a thank you for finding the flaw and proving its existence. Now that this is well known, Google can plug the hole and restore peace of mind to its millions of users.

For now, only install plugins from people you know and trust, this exploit is dangerous.
http://thenextweb.com/google/2010/07...omes-security/





A Web Site That’s Not Afraid to Pick a Fight
Jennifer Mascia

When Jon Stewart announced on the June 29 episode of “The Daily Show” that “Jezebel thinks I’m a sexist,” some viewers may have been wondering: who exactly is Jezebel?

At least a million and a half people can answer that question; that’s how many visited the site, a women’s interest blog, last month. Mr. Stewart’s comment was a response to Jezebel’s recent report on claims by women who say they faced a sexist environment when they were “Daily Show” writers and correspondents. The post garnered more than 211,000 page views, over 1,000 comments and a sharp retort from 32 female employees currently with “The Daily Show.”

Jezebel began in 2007 as a postfeminist companion to Gawker.com, the New York media insider blog, and in some ways has eclipsed its sibling, capturing an impassioned female audience and recently surpassing Gawker in monthly page views.

And Mr. Stewart is hardly the first media heavyweight the site has taken to task. Jezebel also weighs in on the sexually predatory nature of the fashion business, skewers celebrities like Gwyneth Paltrow and Elle MacPherson, and chronicles the doctored photographs in fashion magazines in a regular feature called Photoshop of Horrors. Jezebel’s audience is 97 percent female, and the site says it gets more than 37 million page views a month and about 200,000 unique visitors each day.

“In media, men are not a coherent sect,” said Nick Denton, owner of Gawker Media, the parent company of Jezebel and Gawker. “You go into a magazine store and see rows upon rows of women’s magazines,” but only a few men’s magazines. With women, he said, “there’s a much clearer collective.”

Jezebel’s approach seems to be paying off. Advertising Age has called the blog “one of the few genuinely intelligent repositories of media/marketing/fashion commentary/celebrity deflation.” The site’s advertisers, which typically pay $8 to $12 per 1,000 impressions, include The New York Times, American Apparel, Dentyne, Skyy vodka, Clairol, Starbucks, and premium and basic cable channels. (In contrast to magazines like InStyle and Vogue, which push expensive handbags, designer clothes, slimming undergarments and long-lasting lipstick.)

Those advertisers are appearing on a site that is certainly cutting, and frequently incendiary. Jezebel did not become one of the fastest-growing sites in the Gawker family without making a few enemies. “In its lifetime, Jezebel has received more complaints per year than any other site,” said Gaby Darbyshire, Gawker Media’s chief operating officer, adding that the posts “that discuss subjects with critical commentary usually draw the hottest fire.”

Jessica Coen, the site’s new executive editor, said that forthrightness is not a ploy to attract advertisers, but part of the Jezebel attitude.

“We’re absolutely not afraid to take on the things that need to be taken on, and we’re not afraid to say things that need to be said,” Ms. Coen said at Gawker Media’s Manhattan offices on Friday, where two dozen writers, producers and technicians design, update and moderate content for seven of the network’s 10 sites. “That’s the whole point.”

Indeed, the morning after Mr. Stewart’s on-air rebuke, Irin Carmon, the staff writer who contributed the original post, continued to hammer the show. And after 32 women who work for the show wrote an open letter in response to Jezebel’s allegations of sexism — they addressed it “Dear People Who Don’t Work Here” and signed off with an expletive-laced suggestion — Ms. Carmon defended herself in a follow-up post by pointing out that the show did not answer questions or make anyone available for comment when she approached Comedy Central before the original critique was published.

Ms. Coen continues to stand by the post. Steve Albani, a spokesman for Comedy Central, said on Friday, “The open letter posted earlier this week speaks for itself, and the show will have no further comment.”

With 50 to 60 posts published daily, Jezebel offsets weighty topics with lighter fare. One popular feature, Midweek Madness, is a tongue-in-cheek dissection of the week’s glossy tabloids; with all the chatter about celebrity pregnancies, the Jezebel staff sometimes refers to it as “Unsolicited Uterus Update Weekly.” Dress Code is a question-and-answer feature that functions as a sartorial Miss Manners; Beauty 101 provides inexpensive and practical alternatives to the cosmetic tips espoused by Vogue and Allure.

Jezebel’s founding editor, Anna Holmes, 37, worked at some of the very magazines Mr. Denton scorned, including both Glamour and Star under Bonnie Fuller. Charged with creating “the Girly Gawker,” Ms. Holmes sought “an antidote to superficiality and irrelevance of women’s media properties.”

“I felt disillusioned by magazines to a certain degree,” said Ms. Holmes, who recently left Jezebel, “because they perpetuate this insecurity factory and present solutions to the insecurities they just created.”

A month after the blog’s inception, Ms. Holmes struck gold when someone involved with the production of Redbook sent Jezebel the July 2007 cover image of Faith Hill before the airbrush was applied. The difference between the raw photo and the final cover is jarring: Ms. Hill’s silhouette has been redrawn, under-eye lines have been smoothed out and one of her arms has been halved in size — all unnecessary alterations, Ms. Holmes said.

“Look at the picture above, and tell us that Faith Hill is not gorgeous and vibrant just the way God — not Photoshop — made her,” she wrote on the site. The ensuing controversy received national attention, officially putting Jezebel on the map and attracting a devoted fan base, one that is not shy about posting comments about past traumas like rape and drug abuse.

Because readers are actively engaged with the content, “Jezebel shows that not only are thousands of eyeballs viewing the site, but they are doing something,” said Kelli Matthews, an instructor of public relations at the University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication. “They’re leaving comments. They’re interacting with each other.

“This helps people feel like part of the Jezebel ‘community,’ which only adds to the loyalty that the site enjoys,” she said.

Last week, Emily Gould, herself a Gawker alumna, wrote a highly critical piece on Slate saying that Jezebel’s criticism of pop culture and “righteously indignant rage” are really just “petty jealousy, cleverly marketed as feminism.”

“The easiest way for Jezebel writers to be provocative is to stoke readers’ insecurities — just in a different way,” she wrote.

But Ms. Coen says that Jezebel’s audience is so loyal because its readers are not condescended to, but leveled with. “It’s great to see such a devoted audience,” she said. “You see that your work matters to people.”

With Jezebel breaking more stories and garnering more unique visitors than ever before, “Advertisers are no longer treating it as a cute new entrant,” Mr. Denton said. “This is Jezebel’s moment.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/12/bu...12jezebel.html





What’s Really Going on Behind Murdoch’s Paywall?
Michael Wolff

Rupert Murdoch is trying to make news at the Times and Sunday Times in London—but he’s not reporting on it. Will his paywall work is the biggest story in the media business, and it would be quite a journalistic coup to document the progress, or lack thereof, that’s being made in trying to convince a skeptical world to shell out 2£ ($3) a week for what’s heretofore been free.

He is not reporting on himself because even less than most news outlets, Murdoch outlets have no objective sense when it comes to their own interests (or the boss’s interests), or willingness to ask questions which the boss might find uncomfortable, or penchant for anything but the party line. The news from News Corp. is always snarlingly good—even when it is very bad.

My sources say that not only is nobody subscribing to the website, but subscribers to the paper itself—who have free access to the site—are not going beyond the registration page. It’s an empty world.

The wider implications of this emptiness are only just starting to become clear. A Murdoch and Fleet Street veteran with whom I’ve been corresponding about the paywall reported to me on his recent conversation with an A-list entertainment publicist: “What was really interesting to me was that this person volunteered a blinding realization. ‘Why would I get any of my clients to talk to the Times or the Sunday Times if they are behind a paywall? Who can see it? I can't even share a link and they aren't on search. It’s as though their writers don't exist anymore.’”

“What Rupert always does,” added my correspondent, “is use whatever technology is available as a publishing mechanism. In this, they are reshaping the Internet, or at least the world wide web, as a simple one-way publishing tool. Take us or leave us. Most will leave. But it fits perfectly with Rupert’s vision and particularly the sentiment of Sunday Times editor John Witherow, who would prefer never to hear a peep from his readers once he has watched the paper leave Wapping in gigantic trucks on a Saturday night. (Not that they leave Wapping anymore, but you get my drift.)”

Murdoch, the historic bugbear of journalists (at least those who don’t work for him) has, curiously, managed to court the journalism community with some success in the matter of his paywall experiment. David Mitchell, writing in the Observer on Sunday in a heavily retweeted article, was full of ire about the righteousness of free news and enthusiasm about the prospects for Internet payment plans—he sees Murdoch as the last best hope for getting us paid for our labors.

Beyond the fact that we journalists, behind a paywall, will have fewer readers (our real currency), Murdoch, I rush to remind, has always run a ruthless newsroom, in which nobody comes out ahead but Rupert. In that light, it may be better to see the paywall as not about making more but about costing less. The paywall, and the integration of the Times and the Sunday Times behind it, becomes the deus ex machina by which (and this has long been a Murdoch dream) Murdoch and his son, James, the paper’s boss (with his eager corporate lieutenants, Rebekah Wade Brooks and Will Lewis), happily tear up several centuries of history and join the Times and the Sunday Times—and save a fortune.

It’s a big story—but you won’t read about it in the papers that know it best.
http://www.newser.com/off-the-grid/p...s-paywall.html





Techmeme Offers Tech News at Internet Speed
Claire Cain Miller

News lovers in Washington can’t live without Mike Allen at Politico. Hollywood squabbles over the relative merits of Sharon Waxman’s TheWrap versus Nikki Finke’s Deadline. The newspaper industry reads the news collected by Jim Romenesko.

One of the first Web sites loaded on Silicon Valley’s laptops and iPhones each morning — and then again and again throughout the day — is Techmeme.

The site, developed by a former Intel engineer, appropriately enough relies on software algorithms to collect technology news in real time into what is essentially the front page of an ever-changing industry newspaper.

But Techmeme also turns to humans to filter the ever-growing number of articles and blog posts published online each day, a method that is being used by Mediagazer, a new sister site for media industry news.

Techmeme could become a model for other industries as a useful way to harness the increasingly unwieldy Web and arm readers who are preparing for business meetings or cocktail parties. Techmeme, a start-up company based in San Francisco, also publishes aggregation sites for politics, celebrity gossip and baseball, and hopes to expand to topics like business or energy.

Aggregation works best for “industries where ideas can change people’s view of things, and there’s money on the line,” said Gabe Rivera, Techmeme’s founder. As the Web gets more and more crowded, news aggregators — both general ones like Digg and Google News, and industry-specific ones like Techmeme and Politico’s “early morning tip sheets” — become essential for overwhelmed readers.

They also play a crucial role in contemporary journalism, as media outlets and amateur reporters churn out an ever-higher quantity of often lower-quality content, said Kristian Hammond, director of the Center for Innovation in Technology, Media and Journalism at Northwestern University.

“The editorial strength that may have been lost in terms of writing is going to be re-emerging in control and curation of sites,” he said. “In order to maintain a grip on an industry, you need to be able to go to someplace that looks at and filters all those documents.”

Unlike RSS feeds, which gather everything on preselected sites or blogs, Techmeme groups stories according to importance, and clusters other reporters’ and bloggers’ perspectives on the same topic.

“Techmeme is our go-to primary source,” said Marshall Kirkpatrick, an editor and lead blogger at ReadWriteWeb, a tech blog. He visits Techmeme up to 15 times a day on his computer and phone, and requires his blog’s other writers to track it for breaking news.

Some aggregation sites, like Google News, rely on software to crawl the Web and spot key words in news stories. This model is fast, but it often misses nuances and different interpretations or developments on the news.

Others, like Digg, ask anyone on the Web to suggest stories, and many readers use Twitter as a user-generated newsfeed. These sites can be amateurish (the link that got the most votes on Digg on a recent morning was a video of someone falling on rollerblades).

Still others, like Arts & Letters Daily and the Romenesko news media blog of the Poynter Institute, rely on human editors to gather the important stories of the day. Individuals who filter the news bring more editorial expertise, but they are often slower and less comprehensive than a computer, and it is difficult to expand the service to other topics.

“We’re more interested in quality than we are in beating other people with deadlines,” said Denis Dutton, the editor of Arts & Letters Daily, which is owned by the Chronicle of Higher Education. It posts three new stories a day and six on Mondays, and sometimes they are a few days old.

Techmeme combines all three strategies, automatically searching the Web, employing editors and accepting tips from readers. Other sites, including Blogrunner, an aggregation site owned by The New York Times Company, also use several of these strategies.

In 2004, Mr. Rivera had received a doctorate in computer science and was working at Intel when he observed that it was difficult to monitor all the blogs sprouting across the Web. He started Memeorandum as an automatic aggregator searching for the political news articles that were most linked to by other sites.

He quit his job a year later and started Techmeme, WeSmirch for celebrity gossip and Ballbug for baseball news.

At first, he listed stories from mainstream news organizations followed by blogger discussion, but that soon changed as bloggers began breaking news. In late 2008, Mr. Rivera hired Techmeme’s first editor, Megan McCarthy.

Since then, the site has become more relevant and popular with its 260,000 readers, who check it three million times a month. Humans do things software cannot, like grouping subtly related stories, taking into account sarcasm or skepticism, or posting important stories that just broke.

“We’re better at anticipating what’s going to be a bigger story than just the algorithm,” said Ms. McCarthy, who now manages its new media site, Mediagazer. “The power of it, when it’s done well, is you’re able to find what you need in a way that you not only see the information itself, but you see it in a context that helps you better understand it.”

The number of people who visit the rival Romenesko media site monthly is down 19 percent since last year, but Mr. Romenesko still sometimes beats Mediagazer’s automated site in posting links. Mr. Romenesko says he checks Mediagazer regularly, “to make sure I’m not missing something huge.”

Still, Techmeme does not catch everything and sometimes it catches too much of the same thing. So Bijan Sabet, a venture capitalist at Spark Capital who reads Techmeme daily, also visits other aggregators, like Hacker News, because they have more diversity. “Techmeme is often dominated by Apple, Google, Facebook or Twitter news,” he said. “That’s great, but insufficient.”

Now that Twitter serves as a broadcast platform, Techmeme plans to include cogent 140-character Twitter posts written by influential people as headlines.

Mr. Rivera has never raised outside capital for his company, which makes enough money from running sponsored company blog posts for advertisers like Microsoft, Google and Intel to eke out a small profit. But he said he might seek investors if it expands to other industries.

He thinks that aggregation would work for certain industries, like finance and energy, but he has learned from his less successful sites that aggregation does not work for all topics.

Ballbug is not as popular because most baseball fans want to read news about their home team, not the entire league. And WeSmirch suffers because readers are not interested in eight different takes on Lindsay Lohan’s jail sentencing.

Though Google News, The Huffington Post and other aggregators get accused of stealing page views from other sites because people do not always click on the original article, Mr. Rivera says his sites drive new readers who do not have time to check dozens of blogs a day.

“You definitely get a lot more traffic when you’re the lead story in a cluster on Techmeme, and it’s super high-quality traffic because it’s where a lot of industry thought leaders go to get their news,” Mr. Kirkpatrick said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/12/te...2techmeme.html





Upstart Music Site Becomes Establishment
Jon Caramanica

Early each weekday morning, the indie music Web site Pitchfork posts five new album reviews. Hours later a 22-year-old reader named David downloads them onto his BlackBerry, reads them on his way to work and muscles out a rambling but surprisingly fluid response using his phone’s MemoPad function: no links, no capital letters at the start of sentences, just adrenalized response.

When he’s done — usually after he gets to work, where he has no Internet access — he e-mails the text to a friend, who posts it on David’s Web site, Pitchfork Reviews Reviews, which, since it began in March, has emerged as a vital and unexpected companion piece full of evangelism and skepticism.

And you can learn a lot about the parent by how the children behave.

All empires have their insurgents, and in its early years Pitchfork was supposed to be the insurgency, pushing back against mainstream music magazines with committed and sometimes idiosyncratic coverage of independent music. Founded in 1995 by Ryan Schreiber as a small Web site, it’s now the most prominent brand in online music journalism — averaging 30 million page views a month — widely believed to have the power to pluck a band from obscurity and thrust it into the indie consciousness, and to push it out just as quickly. It exerts its own gravitational pull. As such, the Pitchfork influence is growing in ways both anticipated and unanticipated.

This month the company unveiled a companion site, Altered Zones, that aggregates the work of several bloggers focused on D.I.Y. music micro-movements. This weekend in Chicago, Pitchfork will hold its fifth annual Pitchfork Music Festival, a three-day event with more than 40 artists that brings the Web site’s universe to life.

And then there’s David. He’s been reading Pitchfork for eight years, since his high school days in a New York City suburb, through college in Manhattan, from which he graduated last December. (David, even though he allowed himself to be photographed, asked to be identified only by his first name for fear of jeopardizing his day job.) Pitchfork is the foundation upon which his musical appreciation, and that of many of his peers, was built.

“Pitchfork is the hegemon of taste,” he said in an interview. Pitchfork Reviews Reviews, while in essence one long love letter to the site, is also a reminder that all brands, even self-styled outsiders, are the establishment to someone.

Over the last 15 years Pitchfork has painted itself as an authority figure with its sometimes ruthless and often controversial album rating system, which assigns scores from 0.0 to 10.0. (David gives out scores too, with the same rating system, to the reviews themselves.) It has helped make Pitchfork the highest-profile advocate for music criticism online.

Like any other criticism outlet, Pitchfork is its own prism of taste. “I don’t think that we see ourselves as anointers,” Mr. Schreiber said. “We’re music critics, and we’ve gained a certain amount of influence.”

Regarding reviews, “there’s definitely a drive to be comprehensive,” he said, though one that’s limited by the interests of the site’s staff and by its vision of its readers’ interests. There’s barely any mainstream rock, country or Latin music and only selective engagement with hip-hop, electronic and world music.

The result is a narrow archive, though an important one. And its stability has added weight, given the generational shifts in music criticism taking place around it. The longtime critic Robert Christgau recently announced that this month’s edition of his Consumer Guide column — a grab bag of pithy letter-graded album reviews that appeared for decades in The Village Voice and lately at MSN.com, and that has served as inspiration for generations of critics — will be his last. With these monthly roundups Mr. Christgau reviewed a few hundred albums a year.

At the same time new forms are developing, fitfully. Last year the critic Christopher Weingarten reviewed 1,000 albums at twitter.com/1000TimesYes, a quixotic experiment in evanescent criticism. This year, sensibly, he’s shooting for a lower number.

(At this point it’s worth mentioning that music criticism is a small if not clubby world: I know socially some people who have contributed to Pitchfork, as well as Mr. Weingarten and Mr. Christgau, with whom I’ve had a smattering of professional dealings over the years.)

“If I’ve learned anything from cyberpunk fiction, and I’ve learned plenty,” Mr. Christgau wrote on the blog of the National Arts Journalism Program in announcing the end of his column, “it’s that worlds do not end, they change.”

The same is true for Pitchfork, driven by forces both internal and external.

It is in the interest of Pitchfork — the editorial concern and the business concern — to cultivate its own galaxy of stars. They typically receive high ratings on the Web site. And in many cases they play the Pitchfork Music Festival. Here’s an unscientific statistic: Only two of the bands playing this year’s festival received a score lower than a 7.5 from the site for their most recent release.

The ratings are not assigned lightly. “Over and over we revisit decisions before they’re on the site,” said Scott Plagenhoef, the editor in chief. Albums are discussed via e-mail and on a staff message board. The review is then assigned to a writer trusted to deliver the group’s opinion. Reviews have individual bylines, but they represent the Pitchfork hive-mind.

And Pitchfork is still happy to take down a big name every now and again. The new Eminem album received a 2.8, and the new M.I.A. album received a 4.4. A low rating still makes for good conversation, though, and page views. M.I.A. is one of the site’s prominent advertisers this week.

But finding the next wave of stars remains Pitchfork’s primary goal. “What I’ve always felt was the main role of music criticism was to draw attention to new artists who are doing things,” Mr. Schreiber said.

With Altered Zones, Pitchfork is reaching into deeper, odder corners of music, in effect deputizing a posse of bloggers to do divining on its behalf. It’s likely that some, if not all, of these bloggers grew up on Pitchfork ideals. Like David they’re children of the site’s influence, though now they’re in partnership with it, another form of symbiosis.

To David, from the outside looking in, Altered Zones is a land grab, plain and simple. “It puts the spotlight on bands earlier and earlier in their careers,” he said with concern. “Great full-length records and great careers will be lost because kids don’t know how to handle that pressure.”

Still, even in his critiques of the site, David is reverent. And his attention has been reciprocated. He Gchats and exchanges e-mail regularly with some of the site’s writers, several of whom sought him out (though they told him he couldn’t tell others that they’d done so). He recently attended a company party as an invited guest. Record labels are beginning to send him promotional copies of records, perhaps seeing him as part of the influence pool now.

But he has no aspirations to be let into the inner sanctum of Pitchfork writers. He hopes to be in law school in a couple of years and after that to get a stable white-collar job — a Pitchfork fan in camouflage.

For fun he has begun trying to guess which albums will receive the site’s coveted Best New Music designation. “It’s like picking an accurate Final Four,” he said. Often he’s right, and it’s thrilling: a little streak of transparency, imagined or otherwise, for a site that closely guards its process.

The Pitchfork honchos are, not surprisingly, flattered but a bit wary of the attention. “He’s using us as a platform,” Mr. Plagenhoef said. “When he’s not talking about the political guesswork, there’s something there that represents the ideal version of our reader.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/15/ar...pitchfork.html





UK Royalty Group Wants Piracy “Cap and Trade” ISP Levy
Jared Moya

PRS for Music proposes that ISPs be charged a “fee for the transmission of unlicensed media on their networks” and that the fee would be “reduced in line with reductions in the volume of unlicensed media transmitted.”

In a new paper titled “Moving Digital Britain Forward, Without Leaving Creative Britain Behind,” PRS for Music, the UK’s leading royalty collection society, is calling for the introduction of a levy on broadband providers based on the amount of pirated music they “allow” to travel across their networks.

It warns that as ISPs install “fatter and fatter pipes” the problem of illegal P2P will worsen and broaden the constituency of content industries affected. It wants to latch onto the fact that the recently enacted Digital Economy Act requires that the country’s Office of Communications (Ofcom) establish a methodology for estimating the level of illegal file-sharing in order to assess the effectiveness of the Act’s measures.

“The Digital Economy Act states this problem has to be measured and measurable problems can be priced,” says the group’s chief economist, Will Page. “The price would be a fine which he says could be paid to either the state or directly to rights holders, and would would rise and fall based on the level of piracy on an ISP’s network.”

He compares this “negative spill over” approach to the “cap and trade” market for carbon emissions.

“It would be up to operators whether and how they wish to affect the transmission of unlicensed media on their networks,” reads the paper. “This has the potential to produce an internal market of different ISP networks adopting different routes to getting their respective pollution indexes down – allowing the cost saving to be passed on to the consumer.”

Alternatively, it also proposes a “positive spillover” approach that would require ISPs to obtain a blanket license like the kind currently issued to broadcasters of all types that would allow them to transmit copyrighted material on their networks in return for a fee.

“Network operators would pay such a fee, and determine for themselves how best to capture the raw value of media on networks,” it says. “A reduction of such fees might occur as a result of changes in the level of media transmitted that has been directly licensed from rights holders.”

It even encourages people to think of ISPs as “venues,” comparing them to Parisian restaurants from the 1850′s, in order to offer a “unifying theme” so that different stakeholders will no no longer see the “problem (and therefore the solution) quite differently.”

It’s quite a stretch to think of ISPs as venues, but I must say I’m amazed by PRS for Music’s brazen attempt to latch onto an otherwise innocuous detail of the DEA for the purpose of creating such an extraordinary new content tax regime. Even if you didn’t illegally share copyrighted material online you would still be subject to the tax in the form of a monthly levy issued by your ISP.

That’s hardly fair, especially when Page was the one who published a study for PRS for Music last year claiming that total music industry revenues are up 4.7% since 2007. Squeezing more money from consumers to fund an industry that is apparently not suffering from the dire economic woes it would have you believe is in poor taste, even for a royalty collection society,

There’s also the question of how large the levy would be, and whether or not it would have the intended neutralizing effect on revenue losses from piracy. And won’t customers just switch to an ISP with a cheaper levy?

Stay tuned.
http://www.zeropaid.com/news/89911/u...rade-isp-levy/





Bye-Bye Batteries: Radio Waves as a Low-Power Source
Anne Eisenberg

MATT REYNOLDS, an assistant professor in the electrical and computer engineering department at Duke University, wears other hats, too — including that of co-founder of two companies. These days, his interest is in a real hat now in prototype: a hard hat with a tiny microprocessor and beeper that sound a warning when dangerous equipment is nearby on a construction site.

What’s unusual, however, is that the hat’s beeper and microprocessor work without batteries. They use so little power that they can harvest all they need from radio waves in the air.

The waves come from wireless network transmitters on backhoes and bulldozers, installed to keep track of their locations. The microprocessor monitors the strength and direction of the radio signal from the construction equipment to determine if the hat’s wearer is too close.

Dr. Reynolds designed this low-power hat, called the SmartHat, with Jochen Teizer, an assistant professor in the school of civil and environmental engineering at Georgia Tech. They are among several people devising devices and systems that consume so little power that it can be drawn from ambient radio waves, reducing or even eliminating the need for batteries. Their work has been funded in part by the National Science Foundation.

Powercast, based in Pittsburgh, sells radio wave transmitters and receivers that use those waves to power wireless sensors and other devices. The sensors, for example, monitor room temperature in automatic systems that control heating and air-conditioning in office buildings, said Harry Ostaffe, director of marketing and business development.

The company recently introduced a receiver for charging battery-free wireless sensors, the P2110 Powerharvester Receiver, and demonstrated it in modules that sense temperature, light level and humidity data, he said. The modules include microcontrollers from Microchip Technology, in Chandler, Ariz.

Until recently, the use of radio waves to power wireless electronic devices was largely untapped because the waves dilute quickly as they spread, said Joshua R. Smith, a principal engineer at Intel’s research center in Seattle and an affiliate professor at the University of Washington.

“That’s changing,” said Dr. Smith, who explores the use of electromagnetic radiation. “Silicon technology has advanced to the point where even tiny amounts of energy can do useful work.”

Two types of research groups are extending the boundaries of low-power wireless devices, said Brian Otis, an assistant professor of electrical engineering at the University of Washington. Some researchers are working to reduce the power required by the devices; others are learning how to harvest power from the environment. “One day,” Professor Otis said, “those two camps will meet, and then we will have devices that can run indefinitely.”

Professor Otis, who designs and deploys integrated circuits for wireless sensing, is in the first group. Dr. Smith of Intel is one of the harvesters, gathering radio power that is now going to waste. And there are plenty of radio waves in the air to provide fodder for him as they spread from Wi-Fi transmitters, cellphone antennas, TV towers and radio stations.

Some of the waves travel to living-room televisions, for example. But others, which would otherwise be wasted as they rise through the atmosphere into space or are absorbed in the ground, can be exploited, he said. “Ambient radio waves,” he said, “can already provide enough energy to substitute for AAA batteries in some calculators, temperature and humidity sensors, and clocks.”

At Intel, Dr. Smith, working with the researcher Alanson Sample of the University of Washington, created an electronic “harvester” of ambient radio waves. It collects enough energy from a TV station broadcasting about 2.5 miles from the lab to run a temperature and humidity sensor.

The device collects enough power to produce about 50 microwatts of DC power, Dr. Smith said. That is enough for many sensing and computing jobs, said Professor Otis. The power consumption of a typical solar-powered calculator, for example, is only about 5 microwatts, he said, and that of a typical digital thermometer with a liquid crystal display is one microwatt.

DR. SMITH and his colleagues have built a second device, powered by radio waves, that collects signals from an outdoor weather station and transmits them to an indoor display. The unit can accumulate enough energy to send an updated temperature every five seconds.

Dr. Reynolds of Duke has long been interested in electronics and wireless equipment. One company he helped found, Zensi, developed a system to sense the amount of electricity used by home appliances; Zensi was bought by Belkin, an electronics concern.

Many electronic devices are limited by batteries that fade away or can’t survive temperature extremes, he said. But, he added, “we are on the cusp of an explosion in small wireless devices” than can run on alternatives to battery power. “Devices like this can live on and on,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/18/business/18novel.html





Who Needs an Antenna? Most Broadcast TV Shows are Online, Analysis Finds
David Lieberman

The Internet seems to suit the suits at ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC, and The CW just fine: The broadcast networks put nearly all of their primetime, daytime, and late night shows online – and for free -- in the TV season that ended in May according to a new analysis from Clicker.com.

About 90% of the broadcast TV programs made it to the Web, with The CW hitting 100%. "I thought it would be about 70%" overall, says Guilliermo Pont, Clicker's director of product.

The online video guide site counted 4,4,20 full episodes from 127 different shows, including 109 from prime time. (NBC's The Jay Leno Show, scrapped in February, was counted as one show even though it was on five nights a week.)

Having all those shows available online for free may gladden Web users. But it could weaken the networks' case when they ask cable and satellite companies to pay for the right to retransmit the programs.

The tally only includes regularly scheduled shows, though: No sports or specials such as the Oscars.

And the networks didn't post 11 shows including ABC's Romantically Challenged, CBS' Criminal Minds and The Big Bang Theory, NBC's Law & Order: SVU, and Fox's American Idol.
http://content.usatoday.com/communit...alysis-finds/1





Peter Fernandez, Voice of Speed Racer in the U.S., Dies at 83
Dennis Hevesi

Peter Fernandez, who provided the rat-a-tat voice of Speed Racer when that animated Japanese television series came to the United States — and who wrote the American lyrics for the show’s theme song — died Thursday at his home in Pomona, N.Y. He was 83.

The cause was cancer, his wife, Noel, said.

The 52-episode “Speed Racer” series was first seen in the United States in 1967 after it appeared in Japan as “Mach Go Go Go.” Speed Racer is a high-spirited teenage race-car driver who seeks out dangerous competition; rollicks with his true love, Trixie; and wonders about his mysterious older brother, who disappears for years and returns as a rival, Racer X. Mr. Fernandez not only did the voice of Speed Racer; he also provided the ominous voice of Racer X, wrote some of the scripts and directed the dubbing cast.

“He took a quintessentially Japanese title and made it so Americans could enjoy it,” said Egan Loo, the news editor of the Anime News Network. “ ‘Speed Racer’ was one of the first titles that turned Americans into fans of Japanese animation.”

Those fans relished Mr. Fernandez’s rapid-fire delivery. “A lot of syllables were used in Japanese,” Mr. Loo said, “and to match the mouth flaps, he filled in the English dialogue with as many words as were needed.”

The most fun in writing scripts, Mr. Fernandez told The New York Times in 2008, was “thinking of the villain names,” like Light Fingers Clepto.

Born in Manhattan on Jan. 29, 1927, Mr. Fernandez was one of three children of Pedro and Edna Fernandez. Besides his wife, the former Noel Smith, he is survived by a sister, Jacqueline Hayes; his brother, Edward; two children from his first marriage, Peter and April Fernandez; a stepdaughter, Elizabeth McAlister; and nine grandchildren. His marriage to Marion Russell ended in divorce.

Mr. Fernandez appeared in the Broadway play “Whiteoaks” when he was 11 and went on to act on children’s radio shows. In 1945 he got work as a writer for pulp magazines.

Fred Ladd, a producer importing “Astro Boy,” another animated Japanese cartoon series, hired him to write English dialogue for that series. Writing and dubbing for “Gigantor” followed, leading to “Speed Racer.”

Two years ago, the directors Larry and Andy Wachowski released a live-action film adaptation of “Speed Racer.” Mr. Fernandez had a cameo as a race announcer.

When the movie came out, Mr. Fernandez and Corinne Orr, who played Trixie, traveled to anime conventions around the country. “People were excited to meet us,” Ms. Orr said. “When Peter signed those autographs he just lit up.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/17/ar...fernandez.html





Closing the Digital Frontier

The era of the Web browser’s dominance is coming to a close. And the Internet’s founding ideology—that information wants to be free, and that attempts to constrain it are not only hopeless but immoral— suddenly seems naive and stale in the new age of apps, smart phones, and pricing plans. What will this mean for the future of the media—and of the Web itself?
Michael Hirschorn

As Chris Anderson pointed out in a moment of non-hyperbole in his book Free, the phrase Information wants to be free was never meant to be the rallying cry it turned into. It was first uttered by Stewart Brand at a hacker conference in 1984, and it came with a significant disclaimer: that information also wants to be expensive, because it can be so important (see “Information Wants to Be Paid For,” in this issue). With the long tail of Brand’s dictum chopped off, the phrase Information wants to be free—dissected, debated, reconstituted as a global democratic rallying cry against monsters of the political, business, and media elites—became perhaps the most powerful meme of the past quarter century; so powerful, in fact, that multibillion-dollar corporations destroyed their own businesses at its altar.

It’s a bit of a Schrödinger’s-cat situation when you try to determine what would have happened if we had not bought into the IWTBF mantra, but by the time digital culture exploded into the mainstream with the introduction first of the Mosaic browser and then of Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer, in the mid-’90s, free was already an idea only the very old or very obtuse dared to contradict. As far back as the mid-’80s, digital freedom was a cause célèbre on the Northern California–based Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link (known as the WELL), the wildly influential bulletin-board service that brought together mostly West Coast cyberspace pioneers to discuss matters of the day.

It gives you a feel for the WELL’s gestalt to know that Brand, who founded the WELL, was also behind the Long Now Foundation, which promotes the idea of a consciousness-expanding 10,000-year clock. Thrilling, intense, uncompromising, at times borderline self-parodically Talmudic, the WELL had roots in the same peculiar convergence of hippiedom and techno-savantism that created Silicon Valley, but it also called out, consciously and un-, to a neo-Jeffersonian idea of the digital pioneer as a kind of virtual sodbuster. The WELL-ite Howard Rheingold, in his 1993 digital manifesto, The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier, described himself as being “colonized” (in a good way) by his virtual community. The libertarian activist John Perry Barlow, an early member of the WELL’s board of directors, was a co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital version of the ACLU.

At the WELL, the core gospel of an open Web was upheld with such rigor that when one of its more prolific members, Time magazine’s Philip Elmer-DeWitt, published a scare-the-old-folks cover story on cyber porn in 1995, which carried the implication that some measure of online censorship might not be a bad thing, he and his apostasy were torn to pieces by his fellow WELL-ites with breathtaking relentlessness. At the time, the episode was notable for being one of the first examples of the Web’s ability to fact-check, and keep in check, the mainstream media—it turned out that the study on which Time’s exclusive report was based was inaccurate, and its results were wildly overstated. In retrospect, what seems notable is the fervor with which digital correctness—the idea that the unencumbered flow of everything, including porn, must be defended—was being enforced. In the WELL’s hierarchy of values, pure freedom was an immutable principle, even if the underlying truth (that porn of all kinds was and would be increasingly ubiquitous on the Web, with actual real-life consequences) was ugly and incontestable.

Digital freedom, of the monetary and First Amendment varieties, may in retrospect have become our era’s version of Manifest Destiny, our Turner thesis. Embracing digital freedom was an exaltation, a kind of noble calling. In a smart essay in the journal Fast Capitalism in 2005, Jack Shuler shows how similar the rhetoric of the 1990s digital frontier was to that of the 19th-century frontier era. It’s a short jump from John L. O’Sullivan in 1839—“The far-reaching, the boundless will be the era of American greatness. In its magnificent domain of space and time, the nation of many nations is destined to manifest to mankind the excellence of divine principles”—to Kevin Kelly, the pioneering conceptualizer of the “hive mind” and a founding editor of Wired, writing in Harper’s in 1994, “A recurring vision swirls in the shared mind of the Net, a vision that nearly every member glimpses, if only momentarily: of wiring human and artificial minds into one planetary soul.” Two years later Barlow, a self- described advocate for “online colonists,” got down on bended knee, doublet unbraced, to beseech us mere analog mortals: “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone … You have no sovereignty where we gather.”

I take you on this quick tour not to make fun of futurism past (I have only slightly less-purple skeletons in my closet), but to point out how an idea that we have largely taken for granted is in fact the product of a very specific ideology. Despite its Department of Defense origins, the matrixed, hyperlinked Internet was both cause and effect of the libertarian ethos of Silicon Valley. The open-source mentality, in theory if not always in practice, proved useful for the tech and Internet worlds. Facebook and Twitter achieved massive scale quickly by creating an open system accessible to outside developers, though that openness is at times more about branding than anything else—as Twitter’s fellow travelers are now finding out. Mainframe behemoths like IBM wave the bloody shirt of Linux, the nonprofit open-source competitor of Microsoft Windows, any time they need to prove their bona fides to the tech community. Ironically, only the “old” entertainment and media industries, it seems, took open and free literally, striving to prove that they were fit for the digital era’s freewheeling information/entertainment bazaar by making their most expensively produced products available for free on the Internet. As a result, they undermined in little more than a decade a value proposition they had spent more than a century building up.

But now, it seems, things are changing all over again. The shift of the digital frontier from the Web, where the browser ruled supreme, to the smart phone, where the app and the pricing plan now hold sway, signals a radical shift from openness to a degree of closed-ness that would have been remarkable even before 1995. In the U.S., there are only three major cell-phone networks, a handful of smart-phone makers, and just one Apple, a company that has spent the entire Internet era fighting the idea of open (as anyone who has tried to move legally purchased digital downloads among devices can attest). As far back as the ’80s, when Apple launched the desktop-publishing revolution, the company has always made the case that the bourgeois comforts of an artfully constructed end-to-end solution, despite its limits, were superior to the freedom and danger of the digital badlands.

Apple, for once, is swimming with the tide. After 15 years of fruitless experimentation, media companies are realizing that an advertising-supported model is not the way to succeed on the Web and they are, at last, seeking to get consumers to pay for their content. They are operating on the largely correct assumption that people will be more likely to pay for consumer-friendly apps via the iPad, and a multitude of competing devices due out this year, than they are to subscribe to the same old kludgy Web site they have been using freely for years. As a result, media companies will soon be pushing their best and most timely content through their apps instead of their Web sites. Meanwhile, video-content services are finding that they don’t even need to bother with the Web and the browser. Netflix, for one, is well on its way to sending movies and TV shows directly to TV sets, making their customers’ experience virtually indistinguishable from ordering up on-demand shows by remote control. It’s far from a given that this shift will generate the kinds of revenue media companies are used to: for under-30s whelped on free content, the prospect of paying hundreds or thousands of dollars yearly for print, audio, and video (on expensive new devices that require paying AT&T $30 a month) is not going to be an easy sell.

Yet lack of uptake by young people will hardly stop the rush to apps. There’s too much potential upside. And with Apple in the driver’s seat, the rhetoric of “free” is becoming notably more muted. In rolling out the iPad, Steve Jobs has been aggressive and, to date, unapologetic about policing apps deemed unacceptable for the iPad store (or apps whose creators hold opinions that are anathema to Apple’s corporate interests or sense of universal order). And Apple has so far refused to enable Flash, the Adobe technology that runs 75 percent of all videos seen on the Web, and is launching its own ad-sales platform, presumably to control and monetize traffic on its devices.

On a more conceptual level, the move from the browser model to the app model (where content is more likely to be accessed via smartly curated “stores” like iTunes, Amazon, or Netflix) signals the first real taming of the Wild Digital West. Apple’s version of the West has nice white picket fences, clapboard houses, morals police, and lots of clean, well-organized places to spend money. (The Internet, it seems, is finally safe for Rupert Murdoch.) These shifts are seemingly subtle, but they may prove profound. Google, which built its once monopolistic position by harnessing the chaos of Web search, has been forced to move aggressively to preserve its business model against this new competition: it has teamed up with the Apple-scorned Flash; is making conciliatory gestures to the content owners it once patronized; has reached a deal to purchase a mobile ad-sales platform; and is promoting its own vision of the future based on cloud computing. Phones using its open-source smart-phone operating system, Android, are outselling the iPhone. Even so, Google still needs for the Web, however it’s accessed, to remain central—because without contextual search advertising, Google ceases to matter. Smart phones in general, and the iPad more pointedly, are not driven by search.

All of this suggests that the era of browser dominance is coming to a close. Twitter, like other recent-vintage social networks, is barely bothering with its Web site; its smart-phone app is more fully featured. The independent TweetDeck, which collates feeds across multiple social networks, is not browser-based. As app-based usage climbs at the expense of the browser and as more content creators put their text, audio, and video behind pay walls, it will be interesting to see what happens to the Twitterverse and blogosphere, which piggyback on, and draw creative juice from, their ability to link to free Web content. If they don’t end up licensing original content, networks such as Twitter and Facebook will become purely communication vehicles. At first glance, Web sites like The Daily Beast and The Huffington Post will have a hard time once they lose their ability to hypertext their digests; on second glance, they will have an opportunity to sop up some of the traffic that once went to their now-paid rivals. Google, meanwhile, is hoping to find ways to link through pay walls and across platforms, but this model will clearly not be the delightfully free-form open plain of the early Web. Years from now, we may look back at these past 15 years as a discrete (and thrillingly indiscreet) chapter in the history of digital media, not the beginning of a new and enlightened dispensation. The Web will be here forever; that is not in question. But as Don Henley sang in “The Last Resort,” the Eagles’ brilliant, haunting song about the resortification of the West, “You call someplace paradise, kiss it goodbye.”

Which brings us back to manifest destinies, physical and digital. As Patricia Limerick has argued in her reconsideration of frontier ideology, the moonstruck rhetoric of Manifest Destiny in the 1800s, though it may have been sincere, neatly papered over a host of less enlightened agendas. The surge west was a critical driver of economic growth, allowing the growing republic to harness vast amounts of natural resources and create new markets. The high-flown ideology of Manifest Destiny was, in short, a cover for a massive land grab (not to mention the slaughter of the Indians). The same is happening online. Now, instead of farmers versus ranchers, we have Apple versus Google. In retrospect, for all the talk of an unencumbered sphere, of a unified planetary soul, the colonization and exploitation of the Web was a foregone conclusion. The only question now is who will own it.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/...frontier/8131/





When Funny Goes Viral
Rob Walker

One weekend this spring, close to 1,000 people gathered on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to attend a sold-out conference devoted to the question “What is awesome on the Internet?” While the event included presenters and moderators with respectable research credentials from the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard and the like, what they had gathered to examine, more or less seriously, is what might be called the ROFL universe. ROFL, which became familiar in the age of texting, stands for “rolling on the floor, laughing” and can serve as a shorthand response to the most ephemeral, silly and frankly unimportant-seeming manifestations of pop entertainment in the early 21st century: absurdly captioned pictures of cats, goof-off remixes of YouTube videos, unlikely Web celebrities, quick-hit visual jokes with unprintable punch lines and sporadic references to Rick Astley.

Tim Hwang, a clean-cut, 23-year-old go-getter from New Jersey, was an organizer of this event, called ROFLCon II, as well as its predecessor two years ago. Back then he was finishing up degrees in economics and political science at Harvard, and he, Christina Xu, who was a fellow student, and other friends began hashing out their definition of “Internet awesome.” They were partly inspired by Randall Munroe, creator of the online comic XKCD, who used a coded message to invite fans to gather in a certain park at a certain time. Hundreds of people showed up. To Hwang, who later became a Berkman Center researcher, there was something curiously powerful about hundreds of strangers gathering in physical space to bond over a shared Internet obsession that most people had never heard of. “Wow, this is a culture in a real sense,” he recalls thinking. “It’s not just people fooling around online.”

That said, much of what is discussed at ROFLCon events are in fact the artifacts of people fooling around. What the ROFLCon organizers meant by “awesome” was, for instance, Tron Guy, a man who is famous online because he posted pictures of himself dressed in an elaborate custom-made costume inspired by a 1980s sci-fi movie. Tron Guy received the first invitation to the first ROFLCon. He accepted. So did a variety of people who attracted cultish online audiences via YouTube or off-kilter sites like Chuck Norris Facts. A young man then known only as “moot,” founder of the notoriously profane Web site 4chan, agreed to appear, as did a clutch of academics and researchers to present papers that dealt with cultural co-optation and online status hierarchies — viewed through the lens of ROFL.

Hwang concedes the metajoke aspect of that first conference in 2008: wouldn’t it be funny and weird to create an event about things on the Internet that are funny and weird? The punch line is that their idea was prescient. Moot, the 4Chan.org founder, who has since revealed his name as Christopher Poole, recently gave a talk at a TED Conference, a gathering of tech and business insiders. There, he explained the origins of Internet foolishness like Lolcats and Rickrolling to its well-heeled, big-thinking audience. Hwang spoke at this year’s South by Southwest Music and Media Conference on the subject of “homemade-flamethrower videos” on YouTube. The department of media, culture and communication at New York University brought in a trio of performers for the main event at its undergraduate conference this winter to give a presentation called MemeFactory, a fast-paced talk with three slide projectors running simultaneously, addressing practically every stupid joke — or Internet meme, to use the common catch-all term — that’s ricocheted across the Web in the past 10 years.

Like practically everything else, people fooling around is transformed by the online context. Consider Rickrolling. As many (but probably not all) of you know, this involves suggesting that a point being made online will be backed up, or refuted, if you click on what appears to be a relevant link; instead, the link takes you to a video for Rick Astley’s 1987 hit, “Never Gonna Give You Up.” This prank became such a fad that it was referenced in the 2008 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, with Astley himself on hand to live-Rickroll the audience. Or consider Lolcats (LOL meaning “laugh out loud”), which even the most casual Internet user has probably come across: funny pictures of cats, made funnier by a pidgin-English phrase in big block letters, joined in what’s referred to as “image macro.” The Mona Lisa (or maybe the Duchamp “Fountain”) of Lolcats shows a chubby feline with a plaintive expression, asking, “I can has cheezburger?” A Seattle entrepreneur named Ben Huh, who now owns icanhascheezburger.com, has made Lolcats the cornerstone of a multimillion-dollar business, producing several books and a slew of similar sites. Not coincidentally, mainstream publishers have paid six-figure advances to total unknowns in hopes of converting ROFL to revenue; CBS is turning some guy’s crude-humor Twitter feed into a sitcom.

So, yes, young people have been messing around forever. But the results have seldom ended up attracting deals with major media companies, sparking discussions at confabs like TED or been included alongside Kermit and Santa Claus in a literal parade of broadly recognizable iconography.

There is, has been and will be no shortage of grand talk of the Internet’s potential. In his recent book “Cognitive Surplus,” Clay Shirky, the New York University lecturer and Web pontificator, suggests that the shift from passive media consumption to active and democratized media creation means we will all work in previously impossible concert to build astonishing virtual cathedrals of the mind, solving the world’s problems instead of vegging out in front of “Gilligan’s Island.” As it happens, he even mentions Lolcats. Because Lolcats are both made and shared by the Internet-#connected masses, they are examples of how Web tools have “bridged that gap” between passivity and activity. But this lasts only a few paragraphs (in which Lolcats are characterized as “dumb,” “stupid” and “crude”). He quickly pivots back to the more high-minded stuff about how “the wiring of humanity lets us treat free time as a shared global resource.”

Shirky is among the thinkers engaged in the popular debate over whether the Internet makes us smarter or dumber. And that question is interesting, but let’s face it: it’s not awesome. What Tim Hwang and his cohorts basically hit upon was the conclusion that, while that debate drags on, funny cat pictures and so on are really, really popular. And maybe another question to consider is what that means — to consider the Web not in terms of how it might affect who we become but rather in terms of how it reflects who we are. ROFL, after all, is not a seductive theory about what enlightened things democratized culture may one day produce; it is a pervasive fact on the ground. This is how sizable chunks of our cognitive resources are actually being deployed, so it’s worth trying to figure out why that is, what functions this stuff serves and how it differs from or falls in line with more familiar forms of entertainment. Perhaps, in other words, it’s worth taking ROFL seriously. Or at least sort of seriously.

People get hung up on whether it’s good or not; that’s not really important,” says Diana Kimball, one of ROFLCon’s original student organizers, who now works for Microsoft. “The best corollary is just regular popular culture. Is pop culture good? That’s debatable. But there’s a whole subset of people for whom the Internet is their pop culture.”

Some people enjoy common knowledge of “American Idol” or the Mets or rumors about Brad Pitt’s love life; some share common knowledge of Tron Guy or YouTube remixes or funny pictures of cats. Maybe this stuff doesn’t debut Thursday night at 9 p.m. on a broadcast network, but it is frequently amplified by megasites like boingboing.net and Fark.com, which in turn are picked over by everyone from FM-radio shock jocks to staid newspapers looking for stories about the next nutty Internet fad. This is the pop-material side of Internet memes.

And at this point, it can’t really be described as just something the Web-crazy kids are doing. At ROFLCon II, I stood in the registration line with a guy in a suit who turned out to be a woodworker living in Maine. At first he was modest about his ROFL knowledge, but soon he was pointing out the various Web celebrities in the room. Plenty of people were college age, but many were a generation or more older than that. Of course, a number of attendees in all age groups were probably marketers, because it turns out that some people are taking the pop-material dimension of ROFL seriously by building businesses around it.

The Lolcat entrepreneur Ben Huh — recently crowned “the Internet’s meme maestro” by Wired magazine — says he thinks the market potential is vast. “What interested me the most was there’s this entire community of people devoted to following the rules and the system behind the framework of Lolcats,” Huh, who is 32, told me. “No one ever said, ‘These are the rules.’ But everybody said, ‘I know the rules.’ ” Huh has a degree in journalism and was in the touchscreen-software business before he persuaded financial backers to help him buy a popular blog devoted to Lolcats in 2007. Today his Cheezburger Network has 45 employees and owns dozens of sites where the goofing-off masses can submit their image macros or other bits of Web humor organized around various themes. The company makes money from advertising, and a couple of its Lolcat books have been best sellers.

To people under 30 or so, Huh contends, these tiny pieces of seemingly trivial Internet-specific culture are more relevant than most of what’s on television. “Just as the sitcom or the 30-minute news broadcast or the soap opera from radio were the hallmark of how a certain generation understood entertainment and culture — the Internet meme is one of those things,” he says.

Huh is not the only person eyeing Internet memes through the lens of the profit motive. Hwang told me that while ROFLCon II was being organized, various marketing professionals and social-media experts pitched themselves as featured guests who could (supposedly) explain how to make brand-building memes. A lot of people who come to ROFLCon or are part of the ROFL universe or whatever you want to call it are worried about or uncomfortable with that. Hwang says: “There’s been this weird push around ‘Did ROFL culture sell out? Who owns all these spaces? What’s Ben Huh doing? This isn’t cool anymore because there’s people making money off it.’ ” And is it turns out, Hwang himself recently took a job at the Barbarian Group, a branding firm known for its keen interest in meme culture.

If one function of ROFL in the online ecosystem is to bring people together around something funny, it also draws lines. The memes of the moment change constantly; new variations are added to its language and older material is recombined to shift or add to its meaning. A MemeFactory presentation I caught at New York University was a dizzying blur: Boxxy, David After Dentist, Star Wars Kid, “Downfall,” Advice Dog, “Imma chargin mah lazer!” Crasher Squirrel, “This is Sparta!” multiple Japanese cartoon clips, a new Chat Roulette prank, Weegee and so on. Your reaction to that list — incomprehensible? kind of played out? — says something about your relationship to “Internet culture.”

This was a running theme at ROFLCon II. Internet memes are basically an endless series of in-jokes, a few of which occasionally cross over into the mainstream (where their origins are rarely known and probably a matter of indifference). A speaker, Kenyatta Cheese of the Web site Know Your Meme, passingly referred to those unfluent in ROFL (or “our culture,” as he called it) as “civilians.” Gabriella Coleman, an assistant professor at N.Y.U. and an anthropologist whose work has focused on hacker culture, law and technology, suggests that knowing your memes helps define “a geeky bunker of Internet culture.” That is to say, each bit of apparent idiocy is an in-group/out-group marker.

The most notorious in-group on the Web today is probably the “/b/” forum on 4chan.org. It has a somewhat unpleasant reputation, for several reasons. One is its association with so-called trolls, malevolent hackers who deploy dazzling technical skill to bully and harass strangers. Some critiques of 4Chan take on a “Reefer Madness” hysteria, but there’s no question that /b/ is obscene and frequently barely literate — a nonstop stream of language and imagery that’s often racist, sexist and homophobic. Its participants are fiercely protective of their bunker. I should note that /b/ has a reputation for responding to interest aroused by attention from, say, magazine articles by flooding the board with the most vile and repulsive material it can come up with, for the explicit purpose of repelling curious newbies.

Christopher Poole, the 22-year-old founder of 4Chan, is a trim, unassuming and articulate guy, who looks more like a young Ron Howard than the slovenly malcontent archetype of a hacker-geek. But if Ben Huh is a figurehead for ROFL as cheery, commodity pop culture, Poole stands for the value of online expression that defies all reasonable standards of taste and even the notion of authorship — let alone the traditional marketplace.

Poole did not set out to create a space for meme generation. He founded 4chan in 2003, when he was 15 and interested in Japanese pop culture. He discovered a Japanese site called 2Chan and was dazzled by the multiple-posts-per-second discussion, even though he couldn’t follow it. He built 4Chan, which continues to include boards devoted to coherent discussions of Japanese pop culture. But 4Chan’s “random” board, /b/, took on a life of its own; it accounts for about a third of the site’s traffic and is, Poole says, “the beating heart of the Web site.”

/B/ requires no registration, and many of its nearly 10 million monthly users simply call themselves Anonymous. It generates something like a million posts a day but has no archive, and this anonymous and ephemeral space has created a nothing-is-sacred attitude that can result in things both weird and offensive. Partly there’s a willingness to wallow in what many people might look away from, to riff on and one-up one another — roaring for “moar,” as spelled by /b/ participants, when a thread or meme takes off internally. It looks crude and reads dumb, but there is also technical skill and raw wit in the /b/ mire. Again, it’s largely young males blowing off steam via harebrained behavior, but doing so in massive numbers and egging one another on in a way that causes some of the results to spill out into the broader culture. If you like the upbeat metaphor of the Internet as a hive mind, then maybe /b/ is one of the places where its unruly id resides.

4Chan is not the only source of ROFL with no known “author” or the only Web site that is provocative. It’s hard to say, for instance, who should really get credit, or blame, for “Downfall,” also known as “Hitler reacts” or “the Hitler meme.” This involves a dramatic scene from the 2004 film “Downfall,” in which the actor Bruno Ganz, as Hitler, realizes his defeat is imminent and begins screaming at his subordinates. It’s in German, but the ROFL versions are each recaptioned so that instead of the fall of the Third Reich, Hitler is freaking out about, say, being banned from Xbox Live or the vuvuzela racket at the World Cup or the news that the film’s production company is trying to have all the “Downfall” parodies taken off YouTube for copyright reasons. Each video was of course made by somebody, but a conversation about the creation of any particular “Hitler Reacts” video with its maker, even if that person could be identified and located, would be meaningless. Only by way of the hundreds of videos and their collective thousands or millions of viewers does it enter the ROFL canon.

Internet anonymity has many critics, but Poole’s argument is that the pockets of anonymous space are crucial for the online ecosystem, particularly as Web users yoke their online activities directly to their real-world identities through services like Facebook. As awful as /b/ can be, its lawless-seeming atmosphere has “fostered creativity,” Poole insists; sometimes it’s when people are hidden away, unconcerned about their reputation or social identity, that they “say and do very interesting things.”

“Let’s go back to 1840,” Jason Scott, a digital archivist and documentarian, said to his audience at the first ROFLCon in 2008. Scott titled his talk “Before the LOL,” and a big part of his message was that interesting people have been doing curious, quirky, playful or offensive things with technology, outside the mainstream, since well before the phrase “the Internet changes everything” was coined.

The talk moved briskly from mid-19th-century catchphrases to telegraph-specific shorthand to ham-radio hacks to amateur Teletype art (nudes included) to Xerox 914-enabled images of Mickey Mouse making obscene gestures. A 1989 list of popular online bulletin-board slang included terms like L8ER and, yes, LOL. Scott’s point is not that nothing new or interesting has happened online since the mid-1990s, but rather to reject the commonplace assertion that contemporary Web culture has created unprecedented expression. There may be changes in degree and scale, but having fun by using technology in warped ways is more of a tradition than a revolution. “The biggest problem if you’re trying to figure out ‘What is this stuff? What are they trying to do?’ is that I think even they don’t completely have a grip on it,” Scott says. “This thing — the Internet, online culture — allows you to engage with interesting people who you otherwise might not be aware of or interesting people who are, themselves, unaware that they’re interesting.”

Internet expression coming from outside traditional media culture could simply be considered as a form of folk or outsider culture, but it’s more typically described as a kind of threat: political blogs opposing the mainstream media or Wikipedia serving as an alternative to the Encyclopedia Britannica. There was some talk along these lines at ROFLCon, but the way Internet memes work suggests a more comfortable synthesis, maybe even a codependency. Many riff off or simply appropriate familiar mainstream-media material. And these days the interesting things done by people who don’t know they are interesting can be instantly referenced on “South Park” or “Family Guy” or just reported as news.

Jonah Peretti knows something about this. Nearly a decade ago, his e-mail exchange with Nike about why its customizing site wouldn’t let him put the word “sweatshop” on his sneakers was passed around so much that he ended up on the “Today” show. Later he created an intentional bit of Internet humor with a site called “Black People Love Us!” Today his view is essentially that ROFL is just another element of the information cycle: he is the founder of BuzzFeed.com, a news-and-entertainment aggregator that’s partly devoted to these new sources of memey entertainment. BuzzFeed flings the mainstream and the grass roots together, so that an item about sea turtles dying in the Gulf of Mexico appears right next to one headlined “Kittens vs. Dinosaurs: A Comparison.” In fact, BuzzFeed is organized by its readers’ shorthand response to what they view — sections include LOL and OMG. “The way people interact with media is more about someone’s reaction, an emotional or even intellectual reaction,” Peretti says. “That is a kind of cultural shift. It’s not ‘I love to read the Style section,’ it’s ‘I love all the LOL stuff.’ ”

And current events don’t merely sit next to LOL material; current events often become LOL material. Thus, Joe Biden’s hot-microphone gaffe, expressing the import of health care legislation in salty terms, instantly became the jumping-off point for BuzzFeed readers to submit their own satirical image macros. The results were too profane (or stupid) to share here, but I can tell you that they fell into the LOL category. “You see the news break,” Peretti says, and “the next day or 12 hours later, people are hungry for the parody of it or the comic relief.”

This stream of bite-size distractions is just the sort of thing that Nicholas Carr, in his book “The Shallows,” maintains is undermining serious and sustained thought. In another recent book, “You Are Not a Gadget,” Jaron Lanier, the technology pioneer and writer, pointedly laments the “vapid video pranks” and “lightweight mashups” that mark what he argues is the disappointing lack of progress in the Web 2.0 era, part of a devolution into a culture of schlock and juvenilia, where recycling mass-media artifacts trumps true individual originality.

But maybe juvenilia has its purpose. “There’s something excellent about freeing the 10-year-old boy in all of us,” says Theresa Senft, a University of East London lecturer, who is writing a book about Internet microcelebrity. Senft’s work deals seriously with the politics and power dynamics of online identity and representation — and she loves ROFL without apologies. “It’s the doofus, the kid who dances in the rain and makes 10,000 fart jokes and laughs at every single one,” she says. “It’s very joyful.” People have a hard time, she added, acknowledging the irrational laughter that the body produces even when the mind isn’t sure why. “How come we can’t think of this stuff as ‘O.K., it’s stupid — but it’s also beautiful in some way’?” she asks. “It’s beautiful to be in the middle of 5,000 e-mails and stressing about your taxes and having someone send you an idiotic video — and just laugh.”

The closing panel discussion at ROFLCon II was “Mainstreaming the Web,” and it included Ben Huh, the Lolcat entrepreneur; Christopher Poole, the 4Chan founder; and Kenyatta Cheese of Know Your Meme, among others. The discussion was surprisingly earnest. (And despite some rumors about trouble#makers from /b/ who were planning to disrupt things, it was almost disappointingly civilized.) There was musing about whether memes signify a subculture and, if so, whether that could last; speculation about the nature of the meme consumer that would have fit in easily at a more traditional Web confab; and audience feedback making the inevitable suggestion that mainstream attention is ruining awesome meme making. Mostly there was consensus. Cheese said that Know Your Meme was founded in part because more mainstream sources (he mentioned Wikipedia) weren’t documenting Internet memes, despite the fact that ROFL material is “fast becoming our common language.”

Earlier, on an afternoon when I was supposed to be calling up media scholars and technology experts to get their take on this fast-growing form of culture, I instead sought a little entertainment online. I wasn’t consciously seeking out the happy distractions of ROFL material, but after the usual flitting around, I paused on a post on HipsterRunoff.com, titled “Keut Hipster Girl Watches White Guy Beat Up Black Guy on Public Bus.” HipsterRunoff frequently comments on Web culture in the texting-speak patois of an idiot-savant “author” named Carles. It can be read as nihilistic, searingly critical or just sort of ROFL. In any case, this post was about a recent “youtubable fight” on a bus in Oakland, in which “an old white guy wearing a fanny pack” pummels a younger black man. “The fight seems racially motivated,” Carles deadpanned, adding: “A cute lil hipster girl watches on, trying to pay attention to her surroundings, but more importantly, she is enjoying the music on her large headphones. Her purple American Apparel outfit and Converse lowtops clash violently with the racial tensions on the bus.” The video itself was as described — and fairly depressing.

But it was clearly getting sucked into the ROFL vortex. The anonymous users of 4Chan’s /b/ forum renamed the older white guy “Epic Beard Man.” They also created a nickname for the indifferent-seeming young woman in the headphones, “Amber Lamps,” inspired by the younger black man’s slurred request for an ambulance. A slew of image macros incorporated these figures and phrases from the clip into visual jokes using every conceivable ROFL trope, collected on Know Your Meme and Encyclopedia Dramatica. Many of the jokes turned on racist language, and the 75,000-plus comments posted to the original YouTube video (which soon had more than four million views) were a carnival of coarseness. The video was linked from BuzzFeed, and the crowd classified it as LOL and OMG. Somebody made a video of Hitler reacting to the incident. Somebody else created an animated version and someone started a site, Epicbeardmanfacts.com. Traditional media sources and “citizen journalists” interviewed both men, and videos of those conversations circulated and became part of the iterations online. The Huffington Post ran an item titled “Why ‘Epic Beard Man’ Is the Fastest Growing Public Fight Meme Ever.”

Awesome? Or appalling? Either way, the Epic Beard Man meme seemed like a good example of one last thing worth considering about “Internet culture.” Among the academics I eventually called was Gabriella Coleman, the N.Y.U. professor. Her research into hacker identities stretches back to the era of 1970s “phreakers” who figured out how to manipulate the phone system and continues through the contemporary trolls who rain grief on Web users they find stupid or bothersome or simply easy to pick on. A mantra in the latter group is that they do it all “for the lulz,” meaning for the LOLs, just because they can. The “for the lulz” attitude can be more broadly thought of as a rationale for the idea that everything is worth making fun of, nothing should be taken seriously, not even a guy getting punched in the face until he bleeds.

Coleman has a particular interest in the different and interlocking ethical codes of the groups she studies. One of the variations she has explored is the “informational trickster,” a formulation that relies in part on the writer Lewis Hyde’s exploration of creative troublemaking figures in the folklore and mythology of multiple cultures in his book, “Trickster Makes This World.” The trickster figures that Hyde writes about break rules, ignore mores and commit prankish acts of mayhem or mischief for selfish reasons. Sometimes the trickster goes too far and pays a price; sometimes the trickster reveals the hypocrisy of the game he just cheated. But invariably, the actions of tricksters bridge two previously divergent worlds, revealing each to the other and changing their relationship permanently.

The more traditional pundits and gurus who talk about the Internet often seem to want to draw strict boundaries between old mass-media culture and the more egalitarian forms taking shape online — and between Internet life and life in the physical world. But I wonder if the trick that converts a bus fight into hilarious entertainment for millions isn’t revealing such boundaries as false. Sometimes the pointless-seeming jokes that spring from the Web seem to be calling a bluff and showing a truth: This is what egalitarian cultural production really looks like, this is what having unbounded spaces really entails, this is what anybody-can-be-famous means, this is how the hunger for “moar” gets sated, this is what’s burbling in the hive mind’s id. But the real point is that to pretend otherwise isn’t denying the Internet — it’s denying reality. In some cases, then, maybe the payoff of ROFL isn’t just the pleasure of laughter, though that surely happens. Trickster expression, intentional or otherwise, doesn’t propose a solution but jolts you to confront some question that you might prefer to have avoided. Like what, exactly, am I laughing at?
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/18/ma.../18ROFL-t.html





Half of Social Networkers Worried about Privacy: Poll
Daniel Lippman

Half of Americans who have a profile on social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace are worried about their privacy, according to a new poll.

The Marist survey showed that people over 60 are the most worried about privacy, and women are more concerned than men.

"We're in an era of information. Some people are concerned, reluctant and skittish about the extent of online information. There's a privacy element that some people feel is getting lost," said Dr. Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion.

Privacy on social networking sites is an ongoing issue. Facebook recently changed its policies to give users more control over how much information from their profiles is public following protests from privacy watchdogs and consumers about the difficulty in changing default account settings.

"It doesn't take much to increase the concern factor and when headlines start blaring about breakdowns in privacy, that goes a long way to raising people's concerns," Miringoff added.

The poll showed that 27 percent of the 1,004 people who took part in the survey were concerned about privacy on social networking websites, and a further 23 percent were very concerned.

Older Americans are more worried about privacy, he said, because social networking websites do not come as naturally to them as to younger people who have a more carefree attitude about the sites and privacy.

Overall, 43 percent of Americans said they keep in touch via social networking websites such as Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn. Forty percent of men, and 45 percent of women, said they had a profile on a networking site.

(Reporting by Daniel Lippman; Editing by Patricia Reaney)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE66E41820100716





Even Without iPhone, Verizon Is Gaining on AT&T
Brad Stone and Jenna Wortham

It is a question that the nation’s early adopters keep hearing from friends: when is the iPhone coming to Verizon?

The combination of the biggest cellphone carrier in the United States and Apple’s smash-hit phone would certainly be a powerful one. And it would be a major challenge to AT&T, which has been the exclusive carrier for the phone since its debut in 2007.

But Verizon could decide that it does not actually need the iPhone, thanks to its deepening ties with Google.

In big cities, AT&T’s network has buckled under the data-heavy demands of the iPhone, frustrating customers. Verizon has managed to avoid similar problems while working with Google, Apple’s latest nemesis, to offer several strong rivals to the iPhone that use the Android operating system from Google.

On Thursday, Verizon will begin selling the Droid X, an Android phone that many say may be the fiercest challenge yet to the iPhone, Steven P. Jobs’s crowning creation.

“Verizon is back in the game, even without the iPhone,” said Craig Moffett, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Company.

Despite the pull of the iPhone, Verizon has managed to steadily increase its share of the smartphone market, to 26 percent in May, from 20 percent in late 2008. In the same period, AT&T’s market share slipped to 40 percent, from around 45 percent, according to comScore. Those numbers do not take into account the impact of the popular iPhone 4, released last month.

Before the original iPhone’s debut, AT&T and Apple signed a five-year exclusive deal that is due to expire in 2012, according to court documents that emerged in a class-action lawsuit against Apple. Only insiders know whether that agreement has been amended.

When the phone proved to be a hit, Verizon appeared to be left out of the race for versatile phones running programs from third-party developers. Verizon was also not particularly friendly with Google, whose participation in an auction of precious wireless spectrum angered Verizon executives. Google wanted to force the federal government to require carriers to make their networks more open to a wide range of devices and software. Verizon executives were furious, vowing that they would not support the Android operating system.

A year later, Verizon recognized the threat posed by the iPhone and began working with Google and Motorola to develop the first of its Android phones, which it sold under the name Droid, a trademark it licensed from Lucasfilm.

Verizon has since collaborated closely with Google to develop six phones running Android, helping to give Google’s mobile operating system 13 percent of the smartphone market in the United States. In contrast, Apple has a 24 percent share, while Research In Motion, maker of the BlackBerry, commands nearly 42 percent.

T-Mobile and Sprint have also jumped on the Android bandwagon. Matt Carter, president of Sprint’s 4G division, said the company was building a portfolio of smartphones that could run on its fourth-generation wireless network, including the Evo, an Android phone made by HTC.

“Obviously, we would love to have the iPhone, but we feel the HTC Evo is a better phone,” he said.

The success of its Android phones has emboldened Verizon to take shots at Mr. Jobs and the iPhone. A recent ad slyly referred to the controversy over the iPhone 4’s antenna design in boasting that the Droid X “allows you to hold the phone any way you like and use it just about anywhere to make crystal-clear calls.”

“Verizon is behaving as if it’s not going to get the iPhone anytime soon,” said Charles Wolf, an analyst at Needham & Company. “The signal I’m getting from the intimacy of Google and Verizon is that it is certainly an engagement, if not a marriage.”

Reports from analysts and the news media have predicted, with almost comic regularity, an iPhone debut on Verizon in the next week, next month or next year. Representatives for Verizon and Apple declined to comment on the matter.

Neither company will rule out the possibility of an eventual union. For Apple, millions of untapped Verizon customers are at stake. Analysts say that a partnership between the two companies could double Apple’s smartphone share — a crucial jump if Mr. Jobs hopes to stay ahead of Google.

At a technology conference last month, when Mr. Jobs was asked whether the iPhone could appear on rival networks, he replied that “the future is long.”

John Stratton, chief marketing officer at Verizon, said in an interview that his company “had a lot of respect” for Apple.

“They have served the industry very well,” he said. “The smartphone category is now growing faster than any other part of our business, and in no small part, that is something we can trace back to the creation of the iPhone.”

A Verizon-Apple coupling faces some obstacles. In particular, Verizon maintains an ironclad grip over the phones on its network, steering marketing campaigns, stamping each device with a prominent logo and often installing its own applications, like its VZ Navigator mapping program.

An Apple executive, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly, said Apple would never agree to put another company’s name on the iPhone.

Then there are business factors. After Mr. Jobs visited rival carriers, AT&T secured the iPhone in part because it offered the most favorable terms. Analysts estimate that Apple brings in an average of more than $650 for each iPhone sold. Consumers pay upward of $200, and AT&T subsidizes the rest.

Verizon, on the other hand, pays far less than $300 for Android, BlackBerry and Palm phones, said Shaw Wu, an analyst at Kaufman Brothers.

Verizon has “done well with the network rollout, they have done well with the financial side of the equation, and they have maintained control by owning the Droid brand,” Mr. Wu said. “Verizon has proven that they don’t necessarily need Apple.”

In addition, Verizon and Google may have agreed to share the revenue generated by sales of Android applications, something Apple does not do, said Philip Cusick, an analyst at Macquarie Research Equities. “Verizon would be uncomfortable ceding those things to Apple,” he said.

Perhaps, he said, it won’t need to. “If Verizon didn’t get the iPhone, it wouldn’t be the end of the world,” he said. “They would continue to add subscribers and new phones.”

But there are also signs that Verizon is willing to compromise to get what remains the world’s most coveted phone. Mr. Stratton of Verizon said the company was relaxing its control over the phones on its network and was even willing to sacrifice that logo.

“We don’t have a hard and fast set of rules we think we need to operate under anymore,” Mr. Stratton said.

One person who seems to believe a Verizon iPhone is a certainty — and is comfortable with that eventuality — is Eric E. Schmidt, chief executive of Google. In an interview last month, he said a Verizon iPhone would not bother him.

“I think they should do what they need to do to make their data network and revenue stronger,” he said. “I am satisfied that the Droid would do well against an iPhone on the same data network.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/15/te...15verizon.html





Why Android's Victory is Inevitable
Glyn Moody

Arguably the most important development in the world of open source in the last year or two has been the rise and rise of Google's Linux-based Android operating system. It's true that the mobiles out there employing it are not 100% free, but they are considerably more free than the main alternatives. More importantly, they are turning Linux into a global, mass-market platform in a way never before seen.

The fact that Android is starting to appear in a wide range of other consumer devices – tablets, set-top boxes, televisions etc. - is one way in which Android has already outpaced its main rival, the iPhone and its associated software ecosystem. The latter still has far more apps than Android, but that's not really surprising, since it was launched some time before. And against that, we have the following notable trend:

The number of apps available on Android Market is expected to surpass 100,000 sometime this month. Just a year ago less than 7,000 aps were available for Android users and six months ago the number was under 25,000. In June alone, developers churned out 15,288 new apps and the positive trend continues.

Of course, a comparison with Apple’s App Store is inevitable. Apple has been the daddy of the mobile app market for a couple of years now and it still enjoys a massive lead, with 225,000 available apps. However, with such impressive growth, Android could narrow the gap and perhaps even overtake Apple over the next few quarters.


That might sound ambitious, but it could even happen faster than that, thanks to Google's new Android App Inventor:

App Inventor is simple to use, but also very powerful. Apps you build can even store data created by users in a database, so you can create a make-a-quiz app in which the teachers can save questions in a quiz for their students to answer.

Because App Inventor provides access to a GPS-location sensor, you can build apps that know where you are. You can build an app to help you remember where you parked your car, an app that shows the location of your friends or colleagues at a concert or conference, or your own custom tour app of your school, workplace, or a museum.

You can write apps that use the phone features of an Android phone. You can write an app that periodically texts "missing you" to your loved ones, or an app "No Text While Driving" that responds to all texts automatically with "sorry, I'm driving and will contact you later". You can even have the app read the incoming texts aloud to you (though this might lure you into responding).

App Inventor provides a way for you to communicate with the web. If you know how to write web apps, you can use App Inventor to write Android apps that talk to your favorite web sites, such as Amazon and Twitter.


Of course, this will lead to even more junk Android apps – already much in evidence - but that doesn't really matter. Users will just concentrate on the ones worth using, and ignore the rest. What it will do, though, is increase the overall visibility and appeal of the ecosystem: however meaningless it is, the number of apps is a kind of marker, and when Android has more of them than the iPhone, it will be a sign of something significant, even if the details aren't.
http://www.computerworlduk.com/commu...3070&blogid=14





Droid X Actually Self-Destructs if You Try to Mod it
Devin Coldewey

Well, I might have recommended a Droid X for big-phone-lovin’ fandroids out there… but now that I’ve read about Motorola’s insane eFuse security system, I’m going to have to give this one a big fat DON’T BUY on principle. I won’t restate all my reasons for supporting the modding, hacking, jailbreaking, and so on of your legally-owned products here — if you’re interested in a user’s manifesto, read this — but suffice it to say that deliberately bricking a phone if the user fiddles with it does not fall under the “reasonable” category of precautions taken by manufacturers.

Really. If you want to make it difficult to hack, that’s fine. You think your software should be enough, that’s fine. But once I pay money for the item, it’s mine, and disabling my device because you don’t like what I’m doing with it falls under the category of sabotage.

Here’s what eFuse does. This information is a couple days old but it’s worth reading if you’re interested in Android, development, or open standards in general. Besides, I just found out about it, so you have to read my words whether you like it or not. or you could just stop reading. Either way. Anyway:

Quote:
If the eFuse failes to verify this information then the eFuse receives a command to “blow the fuse” or “trip the fuse”. This results in the booting process becoming corrupted and resulting in a permanent bricking of the Phone. This FailSafe is activated anytime the bootloader is tampered with or any of the above three parts of the phone has been tampered with.
It requires a hardware fix, apparently, only available through Motorola, of course. This is the equivalent of a MacBook detonating some core component if you try to install an OS to dual boot.

Will many users run into this problem? Probably not, but Android is a platform that not only was founded on the idea of openness, but thrives because of it. The grey market of sideloaded apps and custom ROMs will only get more popular and more easily accessed as people realize that their phones are tiny computers waiting to be customized. That idea is anathema to Motorola and clearly they will continue to stoop to unreasonable means to “protect” their hardware — which you bought and paid for.

So here’s my official recommendation: don’t buy a Droid phone and don’t recommend them to your friends. There are too many good options out there that aren’t locked down by nefarious means. Look up a Galaxy phone or wait for the next awesome thing to come along. Vote with your wallet and tell Motorola “open or GTFO.”
http://www.mobilecrunch.com/2010/07/...try-to-mod-it/





Reality Check: Modding the DROID X May Not Lead to a Bricked Phone
Kelly Hodgkins

A post by p3Droid on the My Droid World forums claims to shed some light on the rumored locked bootloader of the DROID X. According to the posting, the Droid X ships with an e-fuse chip that locks the bootloader and will brick the phone if the bootloader is modified. The news is spreading like wildfire with many would-be ROM flashers wondering if they should avoid the DROID X like a plague. This breaking news may not be as dire as many are claiming, as a google search of OMAP3 and e-fuse reveals that current OMAP handsets already have e-fuse in place as part of the M-Shield hardware security technology built into TI’s OMAP system on a chip. It is on the very hackable DROID and the not-so-hacking-friendly Milestone, but it is not being used by Motorola to lock the bootloader of the handset. The current theory being put forth by the non-alarmists in the Android hacking community suggests that the DROID X is locked in a similar manner to the Milestone. Though it may be difficult to crack, and may lead to many hairs being pulled out, mucking with the bootloader probably won’t brick your phone. As the DROID X lands into the hands of the Android hacking community in the upcoming days, we should know a lot more about the state of rooting and flashing on Verizon’s flagship Android handset. Be calm. Stay tuned. It’s just a phone.
http://www.boygeniusreport.com/2010/...bricked-phone/





Motorola Responds to Droid X Bootloader Controversy, Says eFuse Isn't There to Break the Phone
Chris Ziegler

There's been a lot of chatter going around the interwebs in the past 24 hours about the Droid X's exceptionally well-locked bootloader -- a situation that is going to make running custom ROMs considerably more difficult (bordering on impossible) compared to your average HTC. Specifically, the culprit is said to be a technology known as eFuse -- developed by IBM several years ago -- which allows circuits to be physically altered at the silicon level on demand. Thing is, the term "eFuse" has taken on an unrelated meaning this week, with My Droid World claiming that some chip inside the Droid X is commanded to "blow the fuse" if it's unable to verify the stock bootloader, which permanently bricks the phone. It amounts to a really, really hard slap on the wrist for anyone trying to hack, say, Sense or stock Froyo onto it.

Considering IBM's historically non-nefarious usage of the term "eFuse," we suspected something was amiss here, so we reached out to Motorola for an explanation. Read on to see what we got back.

"Motorola's primary focus is the security of our end users and protection of their data, while also meeting carrier, partner and legal requirements. The Droid X and a majority of Android consumer devices on the market today have a secured bootloader. In reference specifically to eFuse, the technology is not loaded with the purpose of preventing a consumer device from functioning, but rather ensuring for the user that the device only runs on updated and tested versions of software. If a device attempts to boot with unapproved software, it will go into recovery mode, and can re-boot once approved software is re-installed. Checking for a valid software configuration is a common practice within the industry to protect the user against potential malicious software threats. Motorola has been a long time advocate of open platforms and provides a number of resources to developers to foster the ecosystem including tools and access to devices via MOTODEV at http://developer.motorola.com."

So in other words, yes, eFuse will shut down a phone with an unapproved bootloader -- but it won't brick the phone, it just needs "approved software" to be dropped back on there. Knowing the wealth of talent in the Android development community, we're still really hopeful this nonsense is going to get circumvented either way, but at least we can breathe a little easier knowing that Moto isn't out to destroy your multi-hundred-dollar investment.
http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/16/m...sy-says-efuse/





Apple Goes on the Offensive
Miguel Helft

Many expected a mea culpa from Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive. Instead, he turned the iPhone 4’s antenna problems into a marketing event on Friday.

At a news conference at Apple’s headquarters here, Mr. Jobs acknowledged that there were issues with the antenna, which wraps around the outside of the device.

But he insisted that the problems, which can result in dropped calls when the device is held a certain way, affect all smartphones — a claim that was challenged by some Apple competitors. And he accused the news media of exaggerating the scope of the issue, saying customers and reviewers were thrilled with the new phone.

“This has been blown so out of proportion that it is incredible,” he said.

Mr. Jobs said that to put the controversy behind it, Apple would give free bumpers — cases that wrap around the rim of the phone and seem to reduce the problem of dropped calls — to all iPhone 4 buyers who want them.

Those who have already bought the cases will be reimbursed, and customers who are still not satisfied can return the phones for a full refund. The cases will remain free at least until Sept. 30, when Apple will consider whether it can offer a different solution.

Some marketing experts said Mr. Jobs had been effective at deflecting a potentially damaging crisis and predicted Apple would suffer little damage from the antenna ruckus.

“It is inexcusable that this problem was not found out in advance,” said Peter Sealey, a former chief marketing officer of the Coca-Cola Company, who teaches at the School of Management at Claremont Graduate University. But he said Mr. Jobs “did what he needed to do. He is the best marketing guy in America, and this is just a bump in the road.”

Mr. Jobs offered some contrition. He said Apple was not perfect and apologized to customers affected by the antenna problem. “We are human and we make mistakes sometimes,” he said.

But he quickly went on the offensive, saying every smartphone suffers from similar problems. To bolster his case, he showed videos of smartphones, including a BlackBerry, an Android-powered phone and a Windows Mobile device, that dropped signals when they were held in certain places.

When a reporter said he could not replicate the signal drop on his BlackBerry, Mr. Jobs said the problem was only evident in places where the signal is weak.

Most of all, Mr. Jobs said time and again that the iPhone 4 was the best phone Apple had shipped, and that most reviewers believed it to be the best smartphone on the market. He said he had evidence to back his claims.

First, only one in about 200 buyers had called Apple to complain about antenna issues, a historically low number, he said. What’s more, he said that return rates at AT&T, the exclusive carrier of the iPhone in the United States, were 1.7 percent, or less than a third the return rates of the iPhone 3GS.

Mr. Jobs conceded that the iPhone 4 suffered from a slight increase in dropped calls over the iPhone 3GS, but said that the increase was less than one additional drop for every 100 calls. He would not provide absolute numbers of dropped calls, but he said that he believed the increase was because fewer iPhone 4 customers were using a case, or bumper.

“The data supports the fact that the iPhone 4 is the best smartphone in the world,” Mr. Jobs said. “And there is no ‘Antennagate.’ There is a challenge to the entire industry to improve antenna performance so that there are no weak spots.”

Mr. Jobs also rejected criticism that Apple had been slow to respond to complaints about the antenna, saying engineers had been working around the clock to diagnose the problem. “It is not like Apple has had its head in the sand,” he said. “It has been 22 days.”

Mr. Jobs revealed that Apple had sold more than three million of the black iPhone 4s and said the white model would start shipping at the end of the month. On July 30, Apple will start selling the iPhone 4 in 17 more countries, including Australia, Austria, Italy, Ireland and Switzerland.

Some Apple rivals took issue with the contention that all smartphones suffer from antenna problems. Karen Lachtanski, a spokeswoman for Nokia, said in an e-mail message that antenna performance can be affected by a tight grip, but added: “That’s why Nokia designs our phones to ensure acceptable performance in all real-life cases, for example when the phone is held in either hand.”

Sanjay K. Jha, Motorola’s co-chief executive, said in a statement that his company had avoided putting antennas on the outside of its phones “because consumers don’t like being told how to hold the phone.”

Mr. Jha said it was “disingenuous to suggest that all phones perform equally,” adding that in the company’s tests, Motorola’s new Droid X had performed better than the iPhone 4 when held in the hand.

Other phone makers and carriers contacted did not return calls for comment.

For its part, Consumer Reports, which shone a spotlight on the iPhone 4 problems by saying Monday that it could not recommend the device, called Apple’s response a “good first step.” Paul Reynolds, the magazine’s electronics editor, said it would continue to withhold its “recommended” rating.

“We want to take a little more time to see what else Apple will come up with,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/17/te...y/17apple.html





Out Of Nowhere, The iPad Has A Real Competitor
Mike Cane

Oh, it’s not an iPad. Not even close to the smoothness and sleekness of one.

However, consider these points:

1) It’s less than half the price of the least-expensive iPad.
That’s $500 for a 16GB iPad versus less than $200 for something you can stick an SD card into — one up to 32GB!

2) It’s Android — which you can now make your own apps for.
Want a silly app with a picture of your cat meowing just for your own amusement? You can do that.

3) It’s in the price point of a crappy eInk device — yet it combines the features of three of them!
Forget buying a Kindle or a Nook or a Kobo Reader. This can do all three of those!

4) It will be on sale all over the place.
Staples, Target, Office Depot, Best Buy, and many, many other places.

What is this mystery device out of nowhere?

It’s the Pandigital Novel. And a very easy method has been discovered to turn it into a full seven-inch screen Android tablet! No rooting is involved!

This weekend, Nate the Great of The Digital Reader was kind enough to give me a sneak peek of a video he’d done of his modified Pandigital Novel.

My jaw dropped.

There it was doing not only the included Barnes & Noble Nook eBook software, but also the Amazon Kindle software and the Kobo Reader software! This turned it into three eBook devices! But Nate didn’t try Aldiko, so I asked him to. He went and re-did the video with that.

Here are some screensnaps from the original unpublished video:

When I asked him what was involved in rooting the device to do that, he revealed no rooting is necessary! All that’s involved is installing a different device driver and then a new Home launcher! This makes modifying the device just about as easy as it can get for nearly everyone!

This is going to shake up everything.

1) The Pandigital Novel will be on sale in more places than the iPad or even the Archos 7 Home Tablet.

2) The Pandigital Novel is allegedly running Android 2.0 — not the 1.5 the Archos 7 Home Tablet is stuck with.

3) This is the cheapest seven-inch tablet out there, period.

4) The screen’s aspect ratio matches that of the iPad, which makes it better for reading.

What are the downsides? What does a sub-$200 price really mean?

1) It’s a resistive screen.
It simply won’t be as responsive as an iPad.

2) It’s not a very bright screen, like the iPad.
But if you intend to do a lot of reading, this is a plus.

3) It’s not a blazing fast CPU.
The specs haven’t been published, but I suspect this is in the 400-600MHz range. It was originally designed primarily for reading, which doesn’t require a lot of horsepower.

4) It’s limited for video.
Unlike the Archos, this will only do MP4 and 3GP video. It’s unknown yet if this new Android video player software will work — or work well.

5) It will be heavier than most eInk devices.

Apple iPad: 9.56” x 7.47” x 0.5” – 24 oz
Pandigital Novel: 5.5” x 7.5” x 0.5” – 16 oz
Barnes & Noble Nook: 7.7” x 4.9” x 0.5” – 12.1 oz
Sony Reader Touch: 6.9” x 4.8” x 0.4” – 10.1 oz
Archos 7HT: 8” x 4.2” x 0.5” – 13.7 oz
Camangi WebStation: 4.72″ x 7.87″ x 0.57″ – 13.75 oz
Sony Reader Daily: 5″ x 8-1/8″ x 19/32″ – 12.75 oz
Sony Reader Pocket: 6.25” x 4.25” x 13/32” – 7.6 oz
Archos 5IT: 5.64” x 3.10” x 0.4” – 6.4 oz (32GB Flash)
Apple iPod Touch: 4.3” x 2.4” x 0.33” – 4.05 oz

6) There’s no 3G, it’s WiFi-only.
But does that really matter?! Tether or MiFi, if you can.

However, keep this in your mind: it’s a full-blown Android tablet for less than $200 freakin dollars! Where are you going to match that?! Everything else I’ve seen in that price range has been from shady sellers on eBay hawking fall-apart hardware from China. Pandigital is based here in America and has even embarrassed themselves to do the right thing for its customers.

And, oh, here’s how to make an Android app with your kitty meowing:

OK, now are you sold?

This cheap tablet, combined with Google’s new app tool, is really going to make a huge different in the Android eco-system. People will be able to inexpensively see how they should design software for larger-screen devices. And by the time more expensive and more powerful Android tablets arrive, there will already be a library of apps available for them. Apple really should get to work on reviving HyperCard. Why shouldn’t I be allowed to make a personal kitty-meow app for myself?!

Go to The Digital Reader post, see the new video, and download the simple instructions!
http://ipadtest.wordpress.com/2010/0...al-competitor/





Apple Shares Slide as iPhone 4 Concerns Grow
Carolina Madrid and Gabriel Madway

Shares of Apple Inc slid more than 4 percent on Tuesday after a poor review for its iPhone 4 from an influential consumer guide underpinned mounting complaints about the hot-selling device's reception and spurred speculation about a product recall.

Analysts thought a recall unlikely but said the world's most valuable tech company needs need to move quickly to avert longer-term damage to its widely respected brand, which allows it to charge a premium for products like the iPad and iPod. The stock should recover on Wednesday, some said.

Consumer Reports said on Monday it could not recommend the iPhone 4 -- which sold 1.7 million units worldwide in its first three days -- after its tests confirmed concerns about signal loss when the device is held in a certain way.

That report spurred widespread discussion on Tuesday, including on popular tech site Cnet and multiple blogs, about the possibility of an iPhone 4 recall: an unheard-of event for a company lauded by investors and tech aficionados for its marketing savvy and product quality.

Apple, which has called the iPhone 4's June debut its most successful product launch ever, has not responded to the widely watched nonprofit organization's report or to the recall talk.

The company has said all cellphones suffer some signal loss when cradled in different ways, and suggested that a software glitch might have misled users by overstating signal strength.

Hudson Square Research analyst Daniel Ernst pointed to speculation that Consumer Reports' article might induce a recall. But some spotted a buying opportunity as Apple's stock bounces off Tuesday's low.

"There's nothing to recall. There's people lining up in droves to buy this phone," said Gleacher & Co analyst Brian Marshall. He said he could not replicate the antenna problem on the iPhone 4.

Apple shares dipped below their 50-day moving average price of $256.26, sliding as much as 4.2 percent to $246.43. They pared losses to trade 2 percent lower at $252.19 Tuesday afternoon, as the Nasdaq gained 1.7 percent.

Shares of Research in Motion, which makes the rival Blackberry, climbed 3.4 percent to $55.62. Google Inc, whose Android operating system for smartphones is gaining traction on multiple devices, also rose, by more than 3 percent to $490.35, along with tech stocks overall.

Analysts said Apple needs to take quick action to avert any lasting damage to its reputation for quality products -- an image honed by iconic gadgets such as the iPod and iPad -- though they did not see sales being hurt for now.

"They need to provide an actual fix -- not a bumper fix -- so that the product performs as it should," said Ashok Kumar at Rodman & Renshaw. "Apple should have taken a higher road when addressing the design flaw, instead of taking the hard-line stance that they did."

"This is not a Toyota problem, but it is a problem that Apple needs to address head-on," he said, referring to the Japanese automaker's global recalls of more than 10 million vehicles since late last year.

Need To Take Action

JP Morgan warned that reports of wireless reception problems on the smartphone, which competes with Motorola Inc's Droid and Palm Inc's Pre, may eventually affect demand.

"Consumer Reports is a well-respected product reviewer, and the report should turn up the heat on Apple," analyst Mark Moskowitz said in a client note. "Concerns around iPhone 4 reception do not appear to be impacting demand, but we think there are risks when a well-respected product rating agency such as Consumer Reports issues an unfavorable report.

"We continue to expect a fix from Apple, whether the solution is software- or hardware-related."

Consumer Reports, which publishes guides on everything from cars to TVs, said in its Monday report that it had tested other phones -- including the iPhone 3GS and Pre -- and found none had the signal-loss problems of Apple's latest iPhone.

It added that AT&T Inc, the exclusive mobile phone carrier for the iPhone 4 and whose network is often blamed for reception problems, was not necessarily the main culprit.

The report was the latest blow to the iPhone 4, which has been plagued by complaints about poor reception. Many of the complaints involve a wraparound antenna whose signal strength is said to be affected if the device is touched in a certain way.

Apple has been sued by iPhone customers in at least three complaints related to antenna problems.

Heavy options trading activity on Tuesday ahead of Friday's July contract expiration suggested investors were bracing for possible Apple news before the weekend, analysts say.

"Apple shares are down on concerns about a possible defect with the new iPhone 4. Worries that iPhone 4 might be a lemon are weighing on their shares," said Frederic Ruffy, options strategists at Web information site WhatsTrading.com.

(Reporting by Carolina Madrid in Los Angeles and Gabriel Madway in San Francisco; Additional reporting by Doris Frankel in Chicago; Writing by Edwin Chan; Editing by Matthew Lewis, Richard Chang and John Wallace)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE66B0OD20100713





RIM co-CEOs: Apple’s Attempt to Draw RIM Into Self-Made Debacle Unacceptable
Andrew Munchbach

Yesterday, Nokia released a statement about antenna design in response to being called out by name in Apple’s iPhone 4 antenna press conference. Early this morning, RIM followed suit. In a statement signed by co-CEOs Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie, RIM gave Apple a quick and concise corporate tongue lashing:

Quote:
Apple’s attempt to draw RIM into Apple’s self-made debacle is unacceptable. Apple’s claims about RIM products appear to be deliberate attempts to distort the public’s understanding of an antenna design issue and to deflect attention from Apple’s difficult situation. RIM is a global leader in antenna design and has been successfully designing industry-leading wireless data products with efficient and effective radio performance for over 20 years. During that time, RIM has avoided designs like the one Apple used in the iPhone 4 and instead has used innovative designs which reduce the risk for dropped calls, especially in areas of lower coverage. One thing is for certain, RIM’s customers don’t need to use a case for their BlackBerry smartphone to maintain proper connectivity. Apple clearly made certain design decisions and it should take responsibility for these decisions rather than trying to draw RIM and others into a situation that relates specifically to Apple.
That ladies and gentlemen is how not to mince words. It is only fair. If you want to pitch, you have to catch. Right Apple?
http://www.boygeniusreport.com/2010/...co-ceos-apple/





Testing the Android Waters
Nick Bilton

I’ve seen it a thousand times: Sit down for coffee or a meeting and those in attendance automatically reach for their cellphones and place them on the table. It’s almost like a subconscious signal that says ‘I’ll be sitting here for a while.’

Several years ago, the phones splayed out in front of me tended to be a mishmash of shapes and sizes: flip phones, clamshells, candybars and sliders. But then these phones started to be replaced by something else, a slick phone with a glossy screen, curved black or white back and the precise incision of an Apple logo: iPhones.

Recently, the mobile buffet has been changing again. This time, some iPhones are being replaced by a family of cellphones running Google’s Android operating system.

You don’t need to look at a table full of phones to see the shift taking place. The numbers clearly show that Android is catching on. HTC, maker of the Google Nexus One phone, has seen its profits rise by 58 percent in the second quarter because of the sale of its Android smartphones. And new studies continue to surface showing the rise of Android use on the mobile Web.

Some of this shift might be only temporary. Some phone owners admit that they are just trying Android phones to get a feel for their options, almost as if they are trying to date other people before deciding whether it’s time to break up. But others I’ve asked said they have cut their ties with the iPhone and are locked into a different two-year relationship.

Brady Forrest, conference organizer for O’Reilly Media, said the iPad had enabled him to switch from the iPhone to Android devices without missing out on Apple’s world. “I’ve been increasingly on the fence seeing the new Android applications and the ability to tether my phone,” said Mr. Forrest, “but the iPad really allowed me to make the switch. Now I have my toe in the iPhone ecosystem, but I’m not constrained by the limitations of the phone.”

For others, the AT&T network and Apple’s restrictions on iPhone software have played a role in their decision.

Kuai Hinojosa, Web applications specialist at New York University, said in a phone interview that he still loves his iPhone, but can’t rely on it for business purposes. To solve the problem, Mr. Hinojosa is forced to carry two phones.

“I like the iPhone as a device. As a smartphone it is way ahead of other phones with design, in usability,” he said. “Now I have a Motorola Droid, too, which I use for work because it’s on Verizon and is much more reliable.”

Lee Gonzales, who works with Integware, a medical consulting company, told me that his ultimate decision to jump to Android was Google’s open approach to the applications it allows on the platform. “I’m an Apple fanboy, to a degree, but I can’t support what they are doing with the walled garden surrounding the App store,” he said.

Mr. Gonzales said he appreciates what Apple has done for the smartphone market, but can’t get past the limitations of the applications. “I’m really tempted to get the iPhone, I adore their user interface and industrial design, but each upgrade of Android really keeps me tied to the Android operating system,” he said.

Although the iPhone 4 sold better than any previous iPhone models, the customer confusion surrounding its antenna issues could add another reason to jump into the Android waters.

But any number of variables could change the dynamic of this race. Either platform could become susceptible to a virus that would make customers take pause. Or Apple could add another carrier, offering the iPhone on the Verizon network, which would likely bring many customers back.

But one thing’s for sure: many haven’t made a final decision. Phone contracts usually last just two years, and if a better alternative comes along from either Apple or Android, it’s easy to jump back to the other side of the pond.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/0...ndroid-waters/





With Fix Now Out, Microsoft Sees Jump in XP Attacks
Robert McMillan

Microsoft urged Windows users to update their software Tuesday, saying it's now seen more than 25,000 attacks leveraging one of the critical bugs fixed in July's monthly security patches.

Microsoft researchers tracked a "fairly large," spike in Web based attacks that exploit the problem over the past weekend, the company said in a blog postingTuesday. "As of midnight on July 12 (GMT), over 25,000 distinct computers in over 100 countries/regions have reported this attack attempt at least one time."

On the busiest single day, Microsoft researchers tracked more than 2,500 attacks, a small number considering Windows' massive user-base. Still, Microsoft and security experts are worried about this flaw because it's been publicly known for more than a month, and has shown up in real-world attacks.

Users in Russia are now the most-targeted, Microsoft said. They have accounted for 2 percent of all attacks, which translates to about 10 times the total number of attacks per computer as the worldwide average. Portugal is the number-two most-targeted region.

Successful attacks secretly install malicious software on the victim's machine, often a program called Obitel. Once Obitel is on a PC, it enables other malware to be loaded, such as malware that can log keystrokes, send spam, or perform other nefarious task.

Two weeks ago, the total number of attacks logged by Microsoft was 10,000.

Security experts say the flaw is being exploited in drive-by Web attacks that are triggered by malicious code placed on hacked or malicious Web sites, although it could also be triggered in other applications -- e-mail readers, for example -- that can interact with Web pages.

To protect themselves from these attacks, Windows users need to install the MS10-042 update, released Tuesday. It fixes a bug in the Windows Help and Support Center, which ships with Windows XP. Although this flaw also affects Windows Server 2003, Microsoft has only seen Windows XP attacks used by criminals.

More-recent versions of Windows such as Vista, Server 2008 and Windows 7 are not affected.
http://www.nytimes.com/external/idg/...cks-12925.html





New Virus Targets Industrial Secrets
Robert McMillan

Siemens is warning customers of a new and highly sophisticated virus that targets the computers used to manage large-scale industrial control systems used by manufacturing and utility companies.

Siemens learned about the issue on July 14, Siemens Industry spokesman Michael Krampe said in an e-mail message Friday. "The company immediately assembled a team of experts to evaluate the situation. Siemens is taking all precautions to alert its customers to the potential risks of this virus," he said.

Security experts believe the virus appears to be the kind of threat they have worried about for years -- malicious software designed to infiltrate the systems used to run factories and parts of the critical infrastructure.

Some have worried that this type of virus could be used to take control of those systems, to disrupt operations or trigger a major accident, but experts say an early analysis of the code suggests it was probably designed to steal secrets from manufacturing plants and other industrial facilities.

"This has all the hallmarks of weaponized software, probably for espionage," said Jake Brodsky, an IT worker with a large utility, who asked that his company not be identified because he was not authorized to speak on its behalf.

Other industrial systems security experts agreed, saying the malicious software was written by a sophisticated and determined attacker. The software does not exploit a bug in the Siemens system to get onto a PC, but instead uses a previously undisclosed Windows bug to break into the system.

The virus targets Siemens management software called Simatic WinCC, which runs on the Windows operating system.

"Siemens is reaching out to its sales team and will also speak directly to its customers to explain the circumstances," Krampe said. "We are urging customers to carry out an active check of their computer systems with WinCC installations and use updated versions of antivirus software in addition to remaining vigilant about IT security in their production environments."

Late Friday, Microsoft issued a security advisory warning of the issue, saying it affects all versions of Windows, including its latest Windows 7 operating system. The company has seen the bug exploited only in limited, targeted attacks, Microsoft said.

The systems that run the Siemens software, called SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) systems, are typically not connected to the Internet for security reasons, but this virus spreads when an infected USB stick is inserted into a computer.

Once the USB device is plugged into the PC, the virus scans for a Siemens WinCC system or another USB device, according to Frank Boldewin, a security analyst with German IT service provider GAD, who has studied the code. It copies itself to any USB device it finds, but if it detects the Siemens software, it immediately tries to log in using a default password. Otherwise it does nothing, he said in an e-mail interview.

That technique may work, because SCADA systems are often badly configured, with default passwords unchanged, Boldewin said.

The virus was discovered last month by researchers with VirusBlokAda, a little-known antivirus firm based in Belarus, and reported Thursday by security blogger Brian Krebs.

To get around Windows systems that require digital signatures -- a common practice in SCADA environments -- the virus uses a digital signature assigned to semiconductor maker Realtek. The virus is triggered anytime a victim tries to view the contents of the USB stick. A technical description of the virus can be found here (pdf).

It's unclear how the authors of the virus were able to sign their code with Realtek's digital signature, but it may indicate that Realtek's encryption key has been compromised. The Taiwanese semiconductor maker could not be reached for comment Friday.

In many ways, the virus mimics proof-of-concept attacks that security researchers like Wesley McGrew have been developing in laboratories for years. The systems it targets are attractive to attackers because they can provide a treasure-trove of information about the factory or utility where they're used.

Whoever wrote the virus software may have been targeting a specific installation, said McGrew, founder of McGrew Security and a researcher at Mississippi State University. If the authors had wanted to break into as many computers as possible, rather than a specific target, they would have tried to exploit more popular SCADA management systems such as Wonderware or RSLogix, he said.

According to experts there are several reasons why someone might want to break a SCADA system "There may be money in it," McGrew said. "Maybe you take over a SCADA system and you hold it hostage for money."

Criminals could use the information from a manufacturer's WinCC system to learn how to counterfeit products, said Eric Byres, chief technology officer with security consultancy Byres Security. "This looks like a grade A case of focused IP-harvesting," he said. "This looks focused and real."
http://www.nytimes.com/external/idg/...ets-61976.html





Italy: UN Rights Expert Calls for Scrapping of Draft Wiretapping Law

An Italian draft law on surveillance and eavesdropping for criminal investigations could jeopardize the work of journalists and threaten their freedom of expression, a United Nations independent human rights expert said today, calling for the abolition or revision of the bill.

According to the current draft, anyone not accredited as a professional journalist can be imprisoned for up to four years for recording any communication or conversation without the consent of the person involved and for publicizing that information.

“Such a severe penalty will seriously undermine all individuals’ right to seek and impart information in contravention of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights [ICCPR] to which Italy is a party,” said Frank La Rue, Special Rapporteur on freedom of expression.

He also voiced concern over a new penalty for journalists and publishers who publicize the contents of leaked wiretapped materials before the start of a trial, an offense that can result in up to 30 days in jail, as well as a fine of up to €10,000 for journalists and €450,000 for publishers.

“Such punishment,” the expert said, “is disproportionate to the offence.”

He cautioned that “these provisions may hamper the work of journalists to undertake investigative journalism on matters of public interest, such as corruption, given the excessive length of judicial proceedings in Italy, as highlighted repeatedly by the Council of Europe.”

On 9 July, journalists and ordinary citizens carried out protests against the draft law across Italy, and Mr. La Rue recommended that the Government “refrain” from adopting it in its current form and to “engage in meaningful dialogue with all stakeholders, in particular journalists and media organizations, to ensure that their concerns are taken into account.”

The expert, who reports to the Geneva-based UN Human Rights Council and serves in an unpaid and independent capacity, said he looks forward to discussing a possible fact-finding mission to Italy next year with the country’s authorities.
http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.as...&Cr=italy&Cr1=





Ha ha ha ha ha. RIAA Paid its Lawyers More Than $16,000,000 in 2008 to Recover Only $391,000!!!

The RIAA's "business plan" is even worse than I'd guessed it was.

The RIAA paid Holmes Roberts & Owen $9,364,901 in 2008, Jenner & Block more than $7,000,000, and Cravath Swain & Moore $1.25 million, to pursue its "copyright infringement" claims, in order to recover a mere $391,000. [ps there were many other law firms feeding at the trough too; these were just the ones listed among the top 5 independent contractors.]

Embarrassing.

If the average settlement were $3,900, that would mean 100 settlements for the entire year.

As bad as it was, I guess it was better than the numbers for 2007, in which more than $21 million was spent on legal fees, and $3.5 million on "investigative operations" ... presumably MediaSentry. And the amount recovered was $515,929.

And 2006 was similar: they spent more than $19,000,000 in legal fees and more than $3,600,000 in "investigative operations" expenses to recover $455,000.

So all in all, for a 3 year period, they spent around $64,000,000 in legal and investigative expenses to recover around $1,361,000.

Shrewd.

No wonder they get paid the big bucks
http://recordingindustryvspeople.blo...s-lawyers.html





RIAA Accounting: Why Even Major Label Musicians Rarely Make Money From Album Sales
from the going-behind-the-veil dept

We recently had a fun post about Hollywood accounting, about how the movie industry makes sure even big hit movies "lose money" on paper. So how about the recording industry? Well, they're pretty famous for doing something quite similar. Reader Jay pointed out in the comments an article from The Root that goes through who gets paid what for music sales, and the basic answer is not the musician. That report suggests that for every $1,000 sold, the average musician gets $23.40. Here's the chart that the article shows, though you should read the whole article for all of the details:

Of course, it's actually even more ridiculous than this report makes it out to be. Going back ten years ago, Courtney Love famously laid out the details of recording economics, where the label can make $11 million... and the actual artists make absolutely nothing. It starts off with a band getting a massive $1 million advance, and then you follow the money:

What happens to that million dollars?

They spend half a million to record their album. That leaves the band with $500,000. They pay $100,000 to their manager for 20 percent commission. They pay $25,000 each to their lawyer and business manager.

That leaves $350,000 for the four band members to split. After $170,000 in taxes, there's $180,000 left. That comes out to $45,000 per person.

That's $45,000 to live on for a year until the record gets released.

The record is a big hit and sells a million copies. (How a bidding-war band sells a million copies of its debut record is another rant entirely, but it's based on any basic civics-class knowledge that any of us have about cartels. Put simply, the antitrust laws in this country are basically a joke, protecting us just enough to not have to re-name our park service the Phillip Morris National Park Service.)

So, this band releases two singles and makes two videos. The two videos cost a million dollars to make and 50 percent of the video production costs are recouped out of the band's royalties.

The band gets $200,000 in tour support, which is 100 percent recoupable.

The record company spends $300,000 on independent radio promotion. You have to pay independent promotion to get your song on the radio; independent promotion is a system where the record companies use middlemen so they can pretend not to know that radio stations -- the unified broadcast system -- are getting paid to play their records.

All of those independent promotion costs are charged to the band.

Since the original million-dollar advance is also recoupable, the band owes $2 million to the record company.

If all of the million records are sold at full price with no discounts or record clubs, the band earns $2 million in royalties, since their 20 percent royalty works out to $2 a record.

Two million dollars in royalties minus $2 million in recoupable expenses equals ... zero!

How much does the record company make?

They grossed $11 million.

It costs $500,000 to manufacture the CDs and they advanced the band $1 million. Plus there were $1 million in video costs, $300,000 in radio promotion and $200,000 in tour support.

The company also paid $750,000 in music publishing royalties.

They spent $2.2 million on marketing. That's mostly retail advertising, but marketing also pays for those huge posters of Marilyn Manson in Times Square and the street scouts who drive around in vans handing out black Korn T-shirts and backwards baseball caps. Not to mention trips to Scores and cash for tips for all and sundry.

Add it up and the record company has spent about $4.4 million.

So their profit is $6.6 million; the band may as well be working at a 7-Eleven.


And that explains why huge megastars like Lyle Lovett have pointed out that he sold 4.6 million records and never made a dime from album sales. It's why the band 30 Seconds to Mars went platinum and sold 2 million records and never made a dime from album sales. You hear these stories quite often.

And note that those are bands that are hugely, massively popular. How about those that just do okay? Remember last year, when Tim Quirk of the band Too Much Joy revealed how Warner Music made a ton of money of of the band's albums, but simply refuses to accurately account for royalties owed, because the band is considered unrecoupable. Sometimes the numbers even go in reverse. If you don't understand RIAA accounting, you might think that if a band hasn't "recouped" its advance, it means that the record labels lost money. Not so in many cases. Quirk explained the neat accounting trick in a footnote to his post about his own royalty statement:

A word here about that unrecouped balance, for those uninitiated in the complex mechanics of major label accounting. While our royalty statement shows Too Much Joy in the red with Warner Bros. (now by only $395,214.71 after that $62.47 digital windfall), this doesn't mean Warner "lost" nearly $400,000 on the band. That's how much they spent on us, and we don't see any royalty checks until it's paid back, but it doesn't get paid back out of the full price of every album sold. It gets paid back out of the band's share of every album sold, which is roughly 10% of the retail price. So, using round numbers to make the math as easy as possible to understand, let's say Warner Bros. spent something like $450,000 total on TMJ. If Warner sold 15,000 copies of each of the three TMJ records they released at a wholesale price of $10 each, they would have earned back the $450,000. But if those records were retailing for $15, TMJ would have only paid back $67,500, and our statement would show an unrecouped balance of $382,500.

I do not share this information out of a Steve Albini-esque desire to rail against the major label system (he already wrote the definitive rant, which you can find here if you want even more figures, and enjoy having those figures bracketed with cursing and insults). I'm simply explaining why I'm not embarrassed that I "owe" Warner Bros. almost $400,000. They didn't make a lot of money off of Too Much Joy. But they didn't lose any, either. So whenever you hear some label flak claiming 98% of the bands they sign lose money for the company, substitute the phrase "just don't earn enough" for the word "lose."


So, back to our original example of the average musician only earning $23.40 for every $1,000 sold. That money has to go back towards "recouping" the advance, even though the label is still straight up cashing 63% of every sale, which does not go towards making up the advance. The math here gets ridiculous pretty quickly when you start to think about it. These record label deals are basically out and out scams. In a traditional loan, you invest the money and pay back out of your proceeds. But a record label deal is nothing like that at all. They make you a "loan" and then take the first 63% of any dollar you make, get to automatically increase the size of the "loan" by simply adding in all sorts of crazy expenses (did the exec bring in pizza at the recording session? that gets added on), and then tries to get the loan repaid out of what meager pittance they've left for you.

Oh, and after all of that, the record label still owns the copyrights. That's one of the most lopsided business deals ever.

So think of that the next time the RIAA or some major record label exec (or politician) suggests that protecting the record labels is somehow in the musicians' best interests. And then, take a look at the models that some musicians have adopted by going around the major label system. They may not gross as much without the major record label marketing push behind them, but they're netting a whole lot more, and as any business person will tell you (except if that business person is a major label A&R guy trying to sign you to a deal), the net amount is all that matters.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...82610186.shtml





PCPro-Computing in the Real World
Barry Collins

A leading music industry figure has labelled attempts to thwart internet file-sharing as a "waste of time".

Peter Jenner, the former manager of Pink Floyd and now emeritus president of the International Music Managers' Forum (IMMF), launched a scathing attack on the music industry's tactics at a Westminster e-Forum.

"Attempts to stop people copying are clearly a waste of time," said Jenner. "Not only are they a waste of time, they make the law offensive. They are comparable to prohibition in the US in the 1920s."

"It's absurd to expect ordinary members of the public to think about what they're allowed to do [with CDs, digital downloads, etc]... and then ask themselves whether it's legal or not," he added.

Jenner said the music industry was fighting against the economics of the internet age. "The marginal cost of a digital file is essentially zero," said Jenner. "That means the market is going to be pushing the cost of digital files to zero. This is an inescapable fact."

"We're fighting against the tide, we're fighting against economic reality."

Jenner said the industry had to consider entirely rewriting copyright law and find new revenue models to preserve the industry. "We have to start thinking radically. Copyright is about the right to copy. We cannot control people's right to copy if they have computers."

He said the industry could adopt the model of sites such as Rapidshare, which offers paying subscribers the opportunity to get faster downloads. "If we can get £1 a month from every person on this island [Great Britain] for music... this is getting very close to the current level of revenue for recorded music," Jenner claimed.

Criminalising a generation

Jenner wasn't the only one calling for a complete overhaul of copyright law. Vanessa Barnett, partner with digital law experts Berwin Leighton Paisner, argued that copyright law had lost the support of the public.

"People don’t feel in their hearts that it’s wrong [to copy music]. We’ve lost the battle over hearts and minds for copyright law."

"A law is only as good as the society that’s prepared to accept it," she added.

Barnett claimed the hurried passage of the Digital Economy Act had further undermined public support for content owners. "We need to properly reflect where copyright law is in the wake of the rush job of the Digital Economy Act," she said.

"From a hearts and minds perspective, the way the act was shoved through parliament has done more harm than good. People see the act as a tool of music industry lobbying."

Law-abiding public

Other music industry figures disagreed with Jenner and Barnett, arguing the law still held firm. "I do not believe there is widespread rejection of copyright among consumers," argued Alison Wenham, chair and chief executive of the Association of Independent Music. "I do accept there's widespread confusion about copyright among consumers."

Will Page, chief economist of the Performing Rights Society, argued that the proliferation of file-sharing sites were damaging legitimate services. "Spotify would have a far better chance of surviving, rather than sinking, if it wasn't for the unfair polluting effect of file-sharing networks," he argued.

Independent record labels agreed. "We put out our records every week, they get ripped off, and we see them online," said Matt Riley, head of digital promotion at Hospital Records. "We want people to copy our music and share it, but we want people to buy it."
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/359458/m...-waste-of-time

















Until next week,

- js.



















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